I'm a grad student in the sciences, so most of my code is developed to analyze and visualize experimental data. (mostly various types of 3D image data) Since

I'm a grad student in the sciences, so most of my code is developed to analyze and visualize experimental data. (mostly various types of 3D image data) Since I often don't understand what my data is trying to tell me at first glance, the majority of my "development" time is spent in front of a whiteboard doing math, or pacing and scribbling on paper while I try to work out a step-by-step for the analysis I want to perform. While actually coding: I tend to measure my output in terms of functions which implement the various "steps" of my analysis. On a good day I might write three or five of these, maybe a total of 200-300 lines of code, and debug them using test data. The next day they typically produce really funky results when run on the real data set, and I realize I actually want to do something completely different. But such is life. :-)