WRDD and FRDD

In his rails class, Matt Knox mentioned a development ideology that may have only been used by accident before. He called it WRDD (web request driven development), in the style of TDD or BDD. Basically, you run an unfinished site live, and make the pages as people find their 404s. Taken further, this idea could be extended into FRDD, or feature request driven development, where the site has no original intention.

Of course he was joking, but I'm wondering if there isn't some merit to it, at least as an exercise in speedy iterations. It makes me think. Basically you have three things to worry about. The first two are the things you need, content, and a place where the content goes. Third, you need a way for users to communicate with you about what they want.

This might be an actual good case for firef.ly. They can communicate where things should be, it doesn't get in the way, and you can have on record who said things when.

I can't see it working too well for commercial purposes, but hobbyists and students might get some benefit out of working this way. A contest or class organized around this could be quite interesting.

A web-design version of pig anyone?