Design System Glossary

Component-driven development

Component-driven development (CDD) is the practice of building UI bottom-up: design and code each component in isolation first, prove it works through every state and variant, then compose components into pages. It's the natural workflow for design systems and the inverse of the older "design the page, slice it later" model.

Storybook, Histoire and Ladle are the tools that made CDD mainstream — they let a developer load a single component, exercise its API, and run visual regression tests without booting the whole app. The payoff is twofold: better-tested primitives and a working component library that documents itself by being usable.