{"id":1185,"date":"2013-08-09T09:17:41","date_gmt":"2013-08-09T07:17:41","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/usersnap.com\/?p=1185"},"modified":"2025-10-10T12:02:43","modified_gmt":"2025-10-10T10:02:43","slug":"bad-habits-in-web-development","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/usersnap.com\/blog\/bad-habits-in-web-development\/","title":{"rendered":"6 bad habits in web development"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

At Usersnap<\/a>, we have over 20 (summed up) years of experience in well organized web development. We figured that track record allows us to call out the good, bad and the ugly in the industry. Now, we don\u2019t like to focus on the negative, but just this once we\u2019ll sum up the bad, as the logical follow-up on our post on best practices in web development<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n

Try Usersnap for Product Development<\/h2>Try Usersnap Now<\/a><\/div>\n\n\n\n

1. Mails with 20 bullet points<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

Mails with 20 bullet points, listing bugs, feature request and what not, are as much a commodity as a problem. Often they lead to accusations and \u201cwhy didn\u2019t you fix $XY, as I pointed out five weeks ago?<\/em>\u201d-s. In case your head of development is not able to drill these monologues down to workable tickets, chances are you forget things. Instead of muttering all kinds of things your mother didn\u2019t teach you, try and educate your clients or managers how to use a bug tracker or project management tool.* That way you both save time sending countless lengthy emails, and they\u2019ll have a better view of what you\u2019re currently working on.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

2. CC\u2019ing the whole team<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

CC\u2019ing all means: you have no idea who can solve this task. Which is bad in itself. If you start doing this, potentially no one will answer or feel responsible. Plus: reading all those mails will kill a lot of precious time for those who are not into it. Find out who is responsible and address that person only. <\/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n

3. Leave testing to someone else<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

Letting somebody test issues who has no idea what the original error was, is yet another way of wasting your team mates time. Example: a customer complains about buttons not working in Internet Explorer. The first dev that gets his hands on it fixes the issue, and another one QA tests it without even knowing how to reproduce the issue.<\/p>\n\n\n

\n
\"testing\"<\/a>
via devopsreactions.tumblr.com<\/a><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n

4. War on the -ends<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

Splitting up your team to fixed parts of your development is a bad idea and incredibly un-agile (don\u2019t worry, we don\u2019t make a habit of using that term). Separating \u2018frontend\u2019 and \u2018backend\u2019 leads to \u201cGrabenk\u00e4mpfe\u201d (or: War on the -ends), which is – not surprisingly – not great for team spirit. Frontend devs will complain that \u201cthe backend changes takes ages\u201d, whereas backend devs will complain about \u201cthe fifth change of the API in this year\u201d.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

5. Release untested code<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

Releasing untested code, just because it\u2019s HiPPO** (highest paid person\u2019s opinion) is a bad idea. Even worse: doing this thing on a Friday evening. Unless of course, you\u2019re not much of a weekend person anyway…<\/p>\n\n\n

Try Usersnap for Product Development<\/h2>Try Usersnap Now<\/a><\/div>\n\n\n\n

6. Optimizing too early<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

Yes, this is harsh, but starting to polish CSS animations while nobody has seen your page is not helping in getting things done. If you have any background tasks or reports, it simply doesn\u2019t matter if they run in 10 or 5 seconds, when your servers are not loaded. Start optimizing once everything works. We do believe in optimization (a lot), just check out point 9 in our previous post<\/a>!<\/p>\n\n\n\n

American computer scientist and Professor Emeritus at Stanford University Donald Ervin Knuth is the author of the seminal multi-volume work \u00b4The Art of Computer Programming\u00b4. In his ‘Structured Programming with go to Statements<\/a>‘ paper he states:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\n

Programmers waste enormous amounts of time thinking about, or worrying about, the speed of noncritical parts of their programs, and these attempts at efficiency actually have a strong negative impact when debugging and maintenance are considered. We should forget about small efficiencies, say about 97% of the time: premature optimization is the root of all evil. Yet we should not pass up our opportunities in that critical 3%.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

In short: starting to optimize before it’s clear what you’re optimizing, brings all kinds of unnecessary complexity and errors.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

We could go on for a while, I mean, I wouldn\u2019t call changing production without backups or developing without specifications bright ideas either. But luckily you won\u2019t encounter these missteps that often.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

For a third post in this series we\u2019ll look into the dark and ugly side of the programming world<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

* You might want to set different (editing) rights for different parties.
**Data killed the HiPPO star<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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