Just as with a traditional desktop application, web applications have varying levels of risk. A personal home page is much less risky than, for example, a stock trading web site. For some projects security, software bugs, etc. are major issues. If time to market or technical complexity is a concern, documentation, test planning, change control, requirements analysis, architectural description and formal design and construction practices can mitigate risk.
Technologies
Lifecycle Model
Time to market, company-growth and requirements churn, three things that are emphasized in web-based business, coincide with the principles of the Agile practices. Some agile lifecycle models are:
Testing
Web applications undergo the same unit, integration and system testing as traditional desktop applications. But because web application clients vary so greatly, teams might perform some additional testing, such as:
Many types of tests are automatable. At the component level, one of the xUnit packages can be a helpful tool. Or an organization can create its own unit testing framework. At the GUI level, Watir or iMacros are useful.
