Build a *minimally functional* app based on client specs. Plan to throw it away; you will anyway.

Not even Brooks believes that any more.

In fact, near the end of The Mythical Man-Month's 20th-anniversary edition, Brooks acknowledges that his advice to "build one to throw away" sounds suspiciously like "make sure the one you keep suffers from the second-system effect", since it's going to be the second system you build. :-)

Non-dogmatic refactoring has worked well for me. Don't feel obliged to reuse code that sucks, but don't feel obliged to throw it out just because Brooks said so in the 1970s, either.

(While we're at it, why stop at three steps?)

--
Yours in pedantry,
F o x t r o t U n i f o r m
"Lines of code don't matter as long as I'm not writing them." -- merlyn

In reply to Re: Three steps to sanity by FoxtrotUniform
in thread OT: Project clients by simon.proctor

Title:
Use:  <p> text here (a paragraph) </p>
and:  <code> code here </code>
to format your post, it's "PerlMonks-approved HTML":


  • Posts are HTML formatted. Put <p> </p> tags around your paragraphs. Put <code> </code> tags around your code and data!
  • Titles consisting of a single word are discouraged, and in most cases are disallowed outright.
  • Read Where should I post X? if you're not absolutely sure you're posting in the right place.
  • Please read these before you post! —
  • Posts may use any of the Perl Monks Approved HTML tags:
    a, abbr, b, big, blockquote, br, caption, center, col, colgroup, dd, del, details, div, dl, dt, em, font, h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6, hr, i, ins, li, ol, p, pre, readmore, small, span, spoiler, strike, strong, sub, summary, sup, table, tbody, td, tfoot, th, thead, tr, tt, u, ul, wbr
  • You may need to use entities for some characters, as follows. (Exception: Within code tags, you can put the characters literally.)
            For:     Use:
    & &amp;
    < &lt;
    > &gt;
    [ &#91;
    ] &#93;
  • Link using PerlMonks shortcuts! What shortcuts can I use for linking?
  • See Writeup Formatting Tips and other pages linked from there for more info.