Giuseppe

We have been practicing Proposal (RFC) Driven Development at work and it is awesome Thread because I am too lazy to write a blog post:

The idea is to write and discuss a proposal in a Google doc before starting development. Normally we do this for features or changes that somehow might affect existing app architecture or when implementing a new abstraction or API.

We go through this process also for bug fixes that might introduce architecture changes.

The goal is to force ourselves to think about architecture, problems and solutions ahead of time and save time when developing. Often we have everything figured out before starting to code and we only end up solving trivial / minor issues when implementing the proposal.

It is also great that we get to discuss things before even starting to code rather than in code review when it might be too late to ask for big changes when spotting architecture flawns.

During this process we also try to come up with estimations and then compare with the actual “time to merge” once something is done. Often estimations are wrong but it is a good exercise.