"write your README.txt ...

[Darren Dirt]

...BEFORE you begin coding."

...how do you make sure your beautiful code isn?t just an abstract work of art, but actually serves the end goal of making your users happy?

Tom Preston-Werner, the co-founder of Github, has some advice: write your README first.

That is, sit down and write out exactly what you want your software to do before you start writing any code. ?Until you?ve written about your software, you have no idea what you?ll be coding,? Preston-Werner says.

Some developers may recall the days of the Waterfall model, a design and coding practice that advocated detailing all the minutiae of, well, everything. Today?s buzzword- systems like Agile Development are in many ways a deliberate attempt to move away from the complexities of the Waterfall Model.

Preston-Werner isn?t advocating a return to it. He carefully points out that the Waterfall model is overly complex, but ?there must be some middle ground between reams of technical specifications and no specifications at all.?

That the middle ground is the good old README.TXT file. It?s typically much shorter than full-blown documentation driven development, but still forces you to go through an abbreviated, but very helpful part of development ? making sure everyone, including you, is clear on what you?re trying to do.

(surprisingly civil discussion/debate re. "Readme-Driven Development": http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1627246 )



( ...and then once you begin coding, another tip: http://www.webmonkey.com/2012/09/the-best-way-to-comment-your-code/ )

[Thorin]

Basically, this says to think about the big picture of what you're making.  In Scrum, you never really think about the big picture, you just thinking about all the little pieces.  The Product Owner thinks about the big picture.

[Mr. Analog]

I find "Big Picture Thinking" dangerous for two reasons:

1. It will never be as perfect as you thought it would (meaning all projects feel like failure)

2. Chasing the one Big Goal means you gain tunnel vision, nothing is as important, that is going to be a problem.

I guess it depends on the size of the project but I've come to learn over the years that very often what you set out to build isn't actually what you need, sometimes that comes through the process of building it, other times it comes from learning from mistakes.