For every coder out there that plans out all of their projects to the nth degree, there's at least 4 or 5 more that are just hacks. I don't mean that in a bad way - just that they throw together statements and classes with no real thought to how they will work in the future. In this new PHPBuilder article, they talk about just that.

For those that are a bit lost, this article comes from the area of categorizing how people program, and methods by which they get it all done (hence "Programming methodology"). They talk a bit about "extreme programming" (here for more on this), and something new that's been evolving - test-first development. They even show you how to apply this programming idea to a code snippet. Basically, the idea behind it is that you include a "test class" or some other code in your application that constantly tests the validity of the data you're shuffling around.

It's an interesting idea, but I'm not too sure how practical it would be in a real development environment - especially with deadlines pressing in (because coders are never procrastinators....naw, never - heh)....