[joshcrews]

I've had good success with clients in letting them see the application come to life. I'll release a working something on week 1 ('something' can be very, very minimal) on a staging site and push updates to it a few times a week.

If you can do this, it takes a world of anxiety off the client. Their biggest fear is that despite everything you are saying, their project isn't really making progress. Such a high percentage of software projects fail; fear of investing money and the project not being delivered on time and on budget will be in the back of their head.

The way I am able to push out regular, small updates (and not push crashes to staging) is by using BDD on each new feature so that I can pile up new feature development without getting majorly sidetracked by regressions or getting majorly delayed by diving into writing some major application code that's not directly solving the present feature.