Key Points

• Player identification. Identification of the business/marketing players. Use of profiling and stereotyping to model the great diversity that are common at most websites. Identification of the key content and domain experts who understand how to make the website effective for its primary business purpose. Identification of the tool features and legacy systems/content that constraint that website.
• Feature identification. Use of checklists, questionnaires, models and behaviour monitoring to identify the features required by the different players.
• Quality profiling to support constructive negotiation between the different players, and to assure a complete view of all important quality features.
• Commercial design. Achieving the balance between system constraints (technical quality) and system benefits. Design websites that are engaging, inspiring and (if you have the talent) cool.
• Killer-feature monitoring, to identify and track commercially sensitive system benefits.
• Use of size and complexity measures (and quality features) to identify components and design decisions that create high maintenance costs and risks for website content.
• Use of risk and cost assessment to optimize the quality profile and design complexity.
• Use of risk management planning to indicate how to improve quality in the project by appropriate staffing, testing, monitoring, and other quality-improvement actions.
• Creating a learning organization. Combining commercial training materials and in-house know-how to create a simple knowledge-base of good practice.

Abstract...

The tutorial is targeted at website producer/directors and managers. It is also strongly recommended for software quality people who are moving into the Internet business. The tutorial addresses website content and structure, and the functionality resulting from using Internet development tools. The tutorial begins by explaining the background of how the web embraces multi-disciplines and multi-practices, and how new web-savvy organizations go beyond the boundaries of traditional industries. The tutorial continues by introducing a set of quality improvement methods that have been developed over the last three years, for web-site development. An explanation is provided of how these methods support each of the main archetypes that are used in the workplace. That is, the engineer, the hunter/trickster, the gatherer, and the warrior.

About the Author

Adrian Cowderoy is Managing Director of the Multimedia House of Quality Limited, a company which he established to promote quality-improvement methods for the production of websites and multimedia.

Mr Cowderoy was the General chair of ESCOM-SCOPE-99 and ESCOM-ENCRESS-98 conferences, and was Program chair for ESCOM 96 and 97 (The European Software Control and Metrics conference promotes leading-edge developments in industry and research, worldwide û see www.escom.co.uk). He is the METRICS-ESCOM Coordinator for IEEE METRICS 2001 and was on the Program committee of Metrics 98 and 99, European Quality Week 99 and COCOMO/SCM 96-99. In 1998 he was acting Conference Chair of the Electronics and Visual Arts conference in Gifu, Japan. He is a registered expert to the European Commission DGXIII.

He has provided consultancy and industrial training courses on quality management, risk management, and cost estimation to the aerospace and medical industries in the UK, Germany and Italy since 1995. He also lectures at Middlesex University (www.mdx.ac.uk) on e-commerce project management and managing Internet start-up's, and at City University, London (www.city.ac.uk), on project management for systems development.

Mr Cowderoy was project manager and technical director of MultiSpace, a 14-month million-dollar initiative sponsored by the European Commission in which 12 European organizations explored the potential to apply quality-improvement methods to multimedia and website development projects. (See www.mmhq.co.uk/multispace and www.cordis.lu/esprit.)

He was a Research fellow at City University from 1990-1998, and a Research Associate at Imperial College from 1986-1989. He was also a quality consultant and software developer at International Computers Limited, UK, from 1980-1985, where he worked on operating and networking systems for mainframes and distributed systems.

His academic qualifications include an MSc in Management Science from Imperial College, University of London in 1986, and is a member of the Association of MBA's. He received a BSc in Physics with Engineering from Queen Mary College, University of London, in 1979.

Mr. Cowderoy has published and presented extensively on multimedia quality and software cost estimation. He was joint editor of Project Control for 2000 and Beyond (Elsevier, 1998), Project Control for Software Quality (Elsevier, 1999), and Project Control: The Human Factor (Elsevier, 2000).