The Bare-Bones Approach
In the bare-bones approach, you GET SOMETHING TO RUN. You work on the beginning, the middle, and the end of your program at the same time. (A program is not an English essay where you complete each section one at a time.)
In the bare-bones approach, your running program starts very short, does almost nothing except print to screen but IT DOES RUN.
You create the overall structure first and ignore the detail. If you need a three-class program, that is what you create – get them to run and work together even if you do not accomplish the specified task. That you do later.
With the bare-bones, you add the detail to a program that already compiles and runs.
Put differently – the bare-bones is the opposite of writing a three-class program of 500 lines that does not compile because it has over 50 errors – this is impossible to debug – where do you start?
In other subjects students have been trained to develop the introduction first – then they work on the body and finally they turn their attention to the conclusion. You do not program like this. You work on the beginning, the middle, and the end at the same time e.g. When creating a new method – you create a method heading, you add the open and close curly brackets to the beginning and the end, and you add a System.out.println( ) to the middle. You call the method from the UI or manager class. Now you get it to compile and run even although it does not do what it is supposed to do – at least it runs. Now any future errors have nothing to do with the overall structure.
In a bare-bones program, you may a large number of dummy System.out.println( ) statements that confirm that your program is running properly. These dummy statements can be deleted or commented out later.