Do others agree that thinking it through completely before hand is optimal?
Are there any studies out there which compare amazing programmers to just average ones on brand new material (where the more experienced programmer doesn't necessarily have the advantage of just more knowledge but has better principles/strategies of breaking down the problem)?
I’ll generally take a pad and pen and write down my requirements and assumptions. This helps flesh out any further information I’ll need before I begin.
Once I’m satisfied that I understand the problem I’ll sketch out a planned architecture (dependency graphs, data structures, etc). If this uncovers more missing information then I’ll get that information and revisit the requirements and assumptions. Sometimes the missing information is that I don’t actually know how to do something in the particular environment I’m coding in. In that case I’ll prototype the minimum code I need to figure out how to do what I need to (I never use the prototype in production code).
Once I have a planned architecture that I’m happy with, writing the tests and code is relatively mechanical and straight-forward.
I’ll do this for pretty much any change to a codebase that is more complicated than changing a single function.