The trend in application design and development seems to be starting with the "guts": the domain, then data access, then infrastructure, etc. The GUI seems to usually come later in the process. I wonder if it could ever be useful to build the GUI first...

My rationale is that by building at least a prototype GUI, you gain a better idea of what needs to happen behind the scenes, and so are in a better position to start work on the domain and supporting code.

I can see an issue with this practice in that if the supporting code is not yet written, there won't be much for the GUI layer to actually do. Perhaps building mock objects or throwaway classes (somewhat like is done in unit testing) would provide just enough of a foundation to build the GUI on initially.

Might this be a feasible idea for a real project? Maybe we could add GDD (GUI Driven Development) to the acronym stable...