---
title: "Other Driven Developments"
description: "The article argues that development models turn implicit lessons into shared, conscious practices as teams, codebases, and responsibilities grow. It presents Grep Driven Development, emphasizing expressive and consistent names so behavior remains searchable, refactorable, abstractable, and predictable, while warning that premature abstraction and locally “improved” naming can hinder later change. It also makes the case for Copy/Paste Driven Development as a deliberate, judgment-based tool, noting that duplication can be cheaper than the wrong abstraction and that abstractions with flags and conditionals may create their own costs. The article names Ego Driven Development and Stickler Driven Development among its four approaches, then concludes with Human Driven Development: choosing, bending, or breaking rules to make work easier for present and future teammates."
---

# Other Driven Developments

[Shopify](https://yomu.fyi/company/shopify) · 2023-10-18 · May 21, 2021

**Type:** Explainer

## Summary

The article argues that development models turn implicit lessons into shared, conscious practices as teams, codebases, and responsibilities grow. It presents Grep Driven Development, emphasizing expressive and consistent names so behavior remains searchable, refactorable, abstractable, and predictable, while warning that premature abstraction and locally “improved” naming can hinder later change. It also makes the case for Copy/Paste Driven Development as a deliberate, judgment-based tool, noting that duplication can be cheaper than the wrong abstraction and that abstractions with flags and conditionals may create their own costs. The article names Ego Driven Development and Stickler Driven Development among its four approaches, then concludes with Human Driven Development: choosing, bending, or breaking rules to make work easier for present and future teammates.

## Context

Mental models and development practices change as methodologies mature and teams grow. The article argues that lessons learned through experience should be turned from unconscious habits into public maxims that help people understand and improve their work.

## Approach / What changed

The article proposes several conscious development approaches, including Grep Driven Development, which favors expressive, consistent naming for searchability and future refactoring, and Copy/Paste Driven Development, which treats duplication as a judgment-based alternative to premature or overly complex abstraction. It ultimately frames these practices as tools that can be used, adapted, or replaced to serve the humans working with the code.

## Takeaways

- Consistent names such as a Job suffix improve grep-based discoverability; adding job behavior through a differently named module can make background work harder to find.
- The rule of three discourages abstraction after a single duplication, and the article argues that copy/paste can be preferable to abstractions built from flags and conditionals.
- Human Driven Development treats methodologies as conscious tools that may be used, bent, or replaced to help current and future teammates understand the code.

**Tags:** [Developer Experience](https://yomu.fyi/topic/developer-experience), [Refactoring](https://yomu.fyi/topic/refactoring)

- Source: [Shopify](https://shopify.engineering/other-driven-developments)
- Source URL: https://shopify.engineering/other-driven-developments
- Ingested by Yomu: 2026-08-30T15:30:27.537Z

[Read original post](https://shopify.engineering/other-driven-developments)