

Fake It. Trash It. Build It. - benehmke
http://42floors.com/blog/fake-it-trash-it-build-it/

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obviouslygreen
It's good that this worked for them, but I think it's a bit questionable to
assume that because it worked in this case it's a good idea (or even an idea
at all instead of just a complete dismissal of planning and structure).

There's a lot of different ideas about how much is too much in terms of up-
front design, but to me this goes a little too far to be called anything but
chaos with a chance happy ending.

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FourthProtocol
It's an old practice - whether you call it a proof of concept, pilot or a
prototype, the tough part is recognising it as such and to be willing to throw
it out.

In the enterprise world this is really difficult because managers hate seeing
those hours produce seemingly nothing, when in fact the product that follows
will inevitably be orders of magnitude better in all respects than the throw-
away that preceded it. Personally, the single biggest payoff I've gained from
this approach is a cleaner architecture that cleanly separates concerns,
allowing individual components to be refined even further.

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flexxaeon
I'd say that your HTML prototype acted as your wire frame. It does seem to
have guided the engineers hand. Nothing wrong with that though. I tend to do a
similar process a lot on my own projects. Being solo, and not much of a
designer, I'm anxious to jump into the HTML/CSS/backend process. Then when I'm
done, I'll call in a designer to "make it pretty", and they'll usually follow
a similar layout.

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jekub
The important step I think here is that the developer not used the initial
HTML prototype as a template when building the application. He just looked at
it and produced code that output code who have a similar visual appearance but
probably with different HTML structure who work well with the code.

If the code was written just to fill some holes in the original prototype,
basically replacing some hard-coded strings, the developer would have less
liberty on how to code lending to something less efficient and less elegant.

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ErikRogneby
It was incredibly refreshing to read about this level of trust being put in
the engineer/developer who needs to make it work right for the long haul.
Version 2.0 is almost always the one you wished you launched with and this is
a great way to get there.

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darxius
Very nice model, I never thought of it that way. I wonder how this technique
would scale to a larger design project.

