Readme Driven Development

Seems that mojombo practices what he preaches. First commit by mojombo (from march 29, 2010) of Github's Gollum wiki reads "readme driven development!" http://github.com/github/gollum/commit/c7875704971be998a5399...

Author here. Fun to see this come up on HN again, every so often. Readme Driven Development still serves me well (that’s how we drove RedwoodJS early on) and we even expanded that into Tutorial Driven Development, where we wrote the RedwoodJS tutorial to show what we wanted to be possible from a DX perspective, and then figured out what code we needed to write to make it possible. It’s been an efficient way to focus on what’s important and…

One of the senior engineers I worked with at my last job was very picky about the difference between verification and validation activities. In testing, most design engineers will focus very heavily on verification activities which seek to answer the question "does what I built satisfy my design intent?" In contrast, validation activities seek to answer the question "did I design and build a thing that actually solves the problem?" It's very important when you're building something that you answer…

This article looks like it has some good ideas in it. But the practical side of me thinks it would probably only work well in the context of small- to medium-sized projects whose users include few, if any, technically ignorant people (libraries, command-line tools, etc.). Maybe (?). Also, this has been submitted & discussed before: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1627246