>> did cause some missed deadlines early on, and getting all the abstractions correct still means basic functionality often doesn't come together until the last minute.
Yes, yes, yes.
>> I think most managers would be horrified this approach
Yes, been there, done that too!
http://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?story=Negative_2000_Lin...
"Bill Atkinson, the author of Quickdraw and the main user interface designer, who was by far the most important Lisa implementor, thought that lines of code was a silly measure of software productivity. He thought his goal was to write as small and fast a program as possible, and that the lines of code metric only encouraged writing sloppy, bloated, broken code."