Identifying appropriate Architectural constructs to satisfy your project’s motivators.
Rapid end-to-end prototyping to flesh out the tool chain and highlight missing information/pain points.
Capture the prototyping steps in a high-level programmatic breakdown of the system behaviour.
Code and Refactor – with the emphasis being on clean data types, function calls, encapsulation and naming.
The importance of refactoring is not to be underestimated. It takes FAR longer than you expect, but if you don’t keep on top of it you don’t really learn to master and decouple the dependencies in your code base, leading to the incremental emergence of a complexity which is no longer maintainable (as no soul can really understand the consequences of their actions fully when they make changes – if that code is not cleanly modularised in every sense).