I'm about to begin a Ruby on Rails project and I'd love to hear how others go through the process of starting an application design. I have quite a bit of experience with RoR, but don't have that many starting from scratch with only a vision experiences and would appreciate the wisdom of others who've been there.
I'm looking for an order of events, reasons for the order, and maybe why each part is important. I can think of a few starting points, but I'm not sure where it's best to begin
- Model design and relationships (entities, how they relate, and their attributes)
- Think of user use-cases (or story-boards) and implement the minimum to get these done
- Create Model unit-tests then create the necessary migrations and AR models to get the tests to pass
- Hack out the most basic version of the simplest part of your application and go from there
- Start with a template for a rails app (like http://github.com/thoughtbot/suspenders)
- Do the boring gruntwork first (User auth, session management, ...)
- ...