Demaestro - 8:39 pm on Nov 23, 2009 (gmt 0)

Bil, what you describe in your first paragraph I do indeed wrestle with

With respect to "client vision versus reality". The way I resolved this issue was to move to a Front Ahead Design when coming up with the core functionality, that way before 1 line of code is written all the screens are designed and the client can "walk" through them and we catch the bulk of "mis-aligned visions" problems.

We couple "FAD" with "Extreme programming" which has a basic mantra that can be summed up as such:

Step 1) Make it work
Step 2) Make it work well
Step 3) Make it work fast

If you only ever finish step 1, you still have something that works.