It's been a while since I used Eclipse, but it seems that you get exactly the effect by writing unit tests before you write the code. Writing SQL views I use a sort of progressive refinement that has a similar 'smell.' With scripts I often set up a shell loop with a marker file, e.g. while true do if [ \! -e .marker.file -o scriptundertest.sh -nt .marker.file ] then ./scriptundertest.sh touch .marker.file sleep 1 else date +'%Y-%m-%s %H:%M:%S - no changes to script' sleep 15 fi done The key thing is that your tests need to be idempotent or otherwise harmless while still giving you the info you need.

I completely agree that AJAX and Atlas will fade. But human factors and design aren't the only things that last. Computer sciences models won't be obsolete - finite automata, context-free grammar, relational algebra, analysis of algorithms.