As developers we continually seek to improve our game. In good teams, people share approaches and patterns.

One approach I use a lot is to write each step of functionality as a one line comment. After all the steps have been 'defined' as comments, I review and refine them - possibly changing the order and refactoring before any code has been written. Once I am happy with the comments, I find that filling in the implementation between the comments is easy.

It keeps code focused and forces me to consider the whole problem before diving straight in.

I obviously haven't invented this approach but it works for me. If you prefix the comments with TODO: in Eclipse, it populates the To Do window. Neat.

So that's one oldie that works for me. What approaches along these lines would YOU recommend?