"It's far easier to do a brain dump and write everything in sequence upfront as a proof-of-concept. That should be in the very early stages only though." I gue

"It's far easier to do a brain dump and write everything in sequence upfront as a proof-of-concept. That should be in the very early stages only though." I guess I'm different to you in that regard. To me, my "brain dump" is a bunch of function skeletons that I write out at a high-level. E.g. if I know at some point I'll have to parse a file, I brain dump it as: result = parse_file(get_file_data()) At that point, I've already defined my "higher-level" brain dump (as you call it) without having to worry about stuff like file-format, filenames, checking for deleted files, etc. "Taking if-blocks or loops and putting them into their own function just to shrink the size of the god function to pretend you're refactoring really serves no purpose though (IMO)" Well, depends on the if-blocks I'd say. 99% of the time, I bet you that those blocks and loops can grouped into logical pieces of work that happen in stages. Claiming that we do it just to "pretend" we're refactoring doesn't really add anything to the conversation.