It looks like people have already picked the low-hanging fruit here, so here are a few things not yet mentioned I try to do that I don't see others do often: I

It looks like people have already picked the low-hanging fruit here, so here are a few things not yet mentioned I try to do that I don't see others do often: I use tools like Libero[1] to express service logic directly as a state machine. I generally try to build and maintain a simulator for whatever I'm working on with tools like SimPy[2] and Spin[3]. I try and use Excel spreadsheets to build mock-up GUI's. I try and make it so that all database access occurs behind service API's. Before I have the basics worked out I don't even bother with an actual database and instead just use memcached[4] and a file of initial data. [1] - http://legacy.imatix.com/html/libero http://legacy.imatix.com/html/libero [2] - http://simpy.sourceforge.net/ http://simpy.sourceforge.net/ [3] - http://spinroot.com/spin/whatispin.html http://spinroot.com/spin/whatispin.html [4] - http://www.danga.com/memcached http://www.danga.com/memcached