Elastic-, plastic- and fracture characteristics of code

I recently had a post about technical debt, and Jelena made a very insightful comment that it was like elastic, plastic and fracture characteristics of materials like steel. I started to comment on the comment, but eventually I thought it deserved its own post.

User-Guide-Driven Development

In my work with Bumblebee I use an approach I call “User-Guide-Driven Development”, or UGDD for short. The mechanics of UGDD is similar to that of Test-Driven Development (TDD), but before I write the test for a feature, I write a snippet of the user guide describing the feature I am about to implement.