XML and SQL: Developing Web Applications

Quality Assurance

You might think talking about QA this early in the book is putting the cart before the horse. Well, you're wrong. Quality assurance must be a thread that runs through your application from requirements capture, definition, and design, to implementation, and on to deployment. The standard, at least for Web application development, tends to be “design, develop, test, deploy.” You'll notice something peculiar about this methodology: If problems are found in testing (and they always are), no step to fix them is included before the deployment phase. No wonder so much bad code is out there in the world! As humans venture into the universe, we're taking this poorly QAed code with us! A prime example of missing QA was the much-publicized ...