On Thu, Jun 18, 2015 at 6:39 AM, Marko Rauhamaa <ma...@pacujo.net> wrote: > Another interesting ism I have read about is the idea that the starting > point of any software project should be the user manual. The developers > should then go and build the product that fits the manual.
I've seldom met a *user* manual that's truly the right way to start building, but there have been times when I've built *API* documentation prior to the code. That can work fairly well. I'll also often start a project with a copious set of notes that aren't quite user-facing, aren't quite programmer-friendly, but are somewhere in between. Here's a new project I'm starting now: https://github.com/Rosuav/ThirdSquare Prior to actually creating that repo, I'd done some thrash testing of the basic concepts (which is how I know that the basic idea will work - my thrash test achieved 100tps, massively exceeding the 40tps that I need, ergo it's worth proceeding to code), but the project itself started with the README, then the .sql files giving a basic run-down of the tables required. Now, and only now, I'm starting to look at actual code. Is that starting with the user manual? Not quite, but I think it captures the same concept that that's trying to capture. ChrisA -- https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
