You can also read this post on my own blog.
You've probably heard the advice to break your work up into manageable chunks, or to break a complex p...
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This combines very well with Test Driven Development and Mocks. At every step, before writing out a function, write 1-2 simple tests that call that function with a sample input and check its sample output. Once you have written the function plug the wished for functions with mocks that return expected results for the inputs. And presto - you already have test data for your next level of functions! When all is done, add a couple more calls to the top level function without any mocks and see how they all work in concert. Done!
If you're willing to go through a rather long article I've written you can get an other example of using the pattern.
TL;DR: I was integrating some C++ code in an Android app, but to get started I just pretended the library code existed while starting working on the GUI.
Worked pretty well ;-)
How does that differ from the top down development model?
In practice, I don't really think it does. It's just my way of thinking about solving problems.
I'm not sure how much of a quick tip this is actually. I wanted my series of quick tip posts to be short and snappy posts, but this one grew slightly longer than expected.