rapid, "throw-away" prototyping is the crucial and neglected stage in project design

a problem I think is endemic in the industry these days [is] the inability or unwillingness to engage in rapid prototyping. Every successful project I've ever worked on (and I've worked on some fairly large enterprise-sized projects), we started by designing and coding a quick "throw-away" skeleton of the application, that let us look at how the thing worked, where the unseen warts were, and where the vendors had lied about their APIs, etc. This is the crucial and neglected stage in project design, one that most modern design paradigms ignore or actively discourage.

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