…which are a top navigation level of guardian.co.uk. However the navigational structure was designed to be quite fluid, and the concept of a zone is really more of an internal reference point than a phrase that’s intended to be used by our site’s users. The ebb and flow of the online media marketplace meant that … Continue reading
…which stands for “you ain’t gonna need it” and is an important principle of Agile development, with strong benefits for the business. The basis for YAGNI stems from a failure common in many software development projects: that when a developer creates a component of a system they tend to give it more flexibility than is … Continue reading
…which was a size of problem we noted but wouldn’t tackle. When we estimated the work for R2 up front we used t-shirt sizes for each feature: S, M, L and XL. The largest single task the team would tackle was an L, which was the equivalent of five days’ work. We felt this was … Continue reading
…which was a semi-regular event of Wii tennis in the office, but a very useful part of our R2 work, too. Each launch required a small army of technologists to be on-hand: to run the various scripts, check the results, and deal with any problems that might arise. We needed to arrange these teams carefully … Continue reading
…which changed in the way we thought about it (and implemented it) a long time after it was released. Originally any piece of content was designated as being of exactly one type: it was either an article, a video, a competition, and so on. To take the video content as an example, putting a video … Continue reading
…whose structure we worked hard to get right as part of the project. This was an important part of weaving ourselves into the fabric of the web: to ensure our referencing system had a useful structure to those outside our organisation. Previously our URLs looked like this: http://politics.guardian.co.uk/tonyblair/story/0,,2075005,00.html today the same piece of content is … Continue reading
…which looked like this: October 2005: Start detailed planning of Travel section. Involved about 12 people from Guardian and ThoughtWorks. Much preparation needs to take place before work can begin. February 2006: Start building the Travel section, initially focusing on the servers, development environment and build pipeline. May 2006: Launch first visible item on Travel … Continue reading
…which was the penultimate step before a launch, after the software had been built and released, and before the technical work to finally lift the curtain. One of the big changes that was part of R2 was how we structured our content — our information architecture. Previously each piece of content lived in a section, … Continue reading
…which people often think stood for the fact that we were building “revision 2″ or “release 2″ of guardian.co.uk. It didn’t stand for that, not least because this is actually the third or fourth such revision since we launched in 1999. In fact, it stood for “rebuild and redesign”. However, while plans for the project … Continue reading
…which is a much misunderstood subject. The R2 team consisted of a number of QAs, and the most obvious artifact that the QAs produced and worked with was the test script: a series of detailed instruction that explained what to test and how to test it. For this reason it’s too easy to dismiss QAs … Continue reading
