I'm currently reading The Pragmatic Programmer and although it contains a lot of those things that are pretty much common sense, there are some true gems in there as well. Especially the part about tracer bullets.
The project I'm currently working on, consists of a number of workflows. One of the flows I'm working on, has to support different production stages; it goes too far to explain, but it's enough to say that there are multiple stages of which the first is the simplest.
Some of those workflows contained steps that were unexpectedly large and had changing requirements, meaning they were difficult to plan. Estimates would change all the time, causing some *cough* friction here and there.
As a remedy, we would first get the full flow working for the first production stage and when the flow ran flawless from start to end, we would build uit each step in the flow to support the next stage.
Hunt and Thomas (the Pragmatic Programmers) call this tracer bullets, which contain a phosphor payload that flashes when it hits the target. In the dark, the gunman then knows that his aim is right.
The idea is good, but it's immensely difficult to resist the temptation when you're frantically coding! Because you're in the Flow and when you've done one part of the functionality, you can see those methods and data structures dangling in front of you. However, you still should break out of the flow at the correct time, synchronize with your team members and the QA people, and get that workflow to, well, flow.
It's amazing what this does to management, the customer and the developer. When the flow works partly, it gives a feeling of confidence to all the parties. This is definitely a good thing.