[radley]

> it becomes more and more important to plan before you write.

I'll counter that with a real-world experience.

I worked at a well known company that did system design & documentation first, without doing prototyping, etc. My first day working on the UI I pointed out that the web app had so many menus that the actual content would barely fit on a 15" laptop screen.

The team debated and debated on how to fix it, but ultimately it kept getting trumped by the documentation team who said the docs are done so we couldn't change anything.

I left after a couple of months. They worked on it for a year before finally tossing it out.

[sanderjd]

Well this is obviously also bad. It is not necessary to either dogmatically code without first planning or discussing, or to dogmatically write a fully specified and unchangeable spec. There is a huge continuum of possibilities between those extremes, which strike a better balance than either approach.