I'd thought of this as similar to Kanban or Test-Driven Development. Before you start designing, look at what you have and ask why it doesn't already work. Tho

I'd thought of this as similar to Kanban or Test-Driven Development. Before you start designing, look at what you have and ask why it doesn't already work. Those answers become manual test cases. Then get it into a test environment immediately, not after more than a day of coding. Every day make the test environment more like production. Run the whole cycle every time, build, release, test, otherwise one of the phases will go astray when you aren't exercising it. I know Kanban is something different but these are all "Don't push from the start of the pipe, pull from the end of the pipe" approaches. It also works with media encoding and decoding. If you push, the buffers fill up and you have to figure out where to stuff packets when the codecs tell you they're full. If you pull, you waste 1 cycle figuring out where to start, but then everything is smooth and just-in-time. It's all the same crap. It's Lean, too. There must be 20 names for this concept.