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CDD (Comic Driven Development) seems the last trend in software development techniques, first experimental evidences show it as particularly successful in getting the fun back to programming.
Ingredients for the recipe are a talented and sharp comic writer (say your favorite geek comic author) and a smart and receptive development team (say the one behind your favorite video-powered online time waster): the comic writer portraits a tremendously useful feature which could clearly improve the life of the many,

the development team makes it real,

and it actually works!

Now the whole CDD thing just needs a wikipedia entry.

Getting the purpose of a software system right is an evergreen theme in software engineering, and one of the fuzziest issues in this beautiful discipline. My friend Marco some times ago posted a great toon on the subject, with a brief and sharp commentary.
On sunday Dilbert posted an awesome strip on the tensions between engineers, customers and requirements:

• engineers want customers to express requirements clearly, possibly in a non-ambigous language (a set of differential equations wuold be perfect ).
• customer wants engineers to guess what they are thinking their problem is.

This would seem a self-referencing non-terminating problem (sounds huge), but Dilbert has the perfect solution:

• As the designed software can do whatever the engineer designs it to do, the engineer should design a software to tell himself customer requirement.

Striking clear, not?