I have not seen any real life examples of successful application of SDD. I heard a lot of marketing BS, but nothing real. My own experiments with SDD produced very disappointing results even on very small projects.
I've had good results from SDD, and so have some of my teammates. The guidance I've heard over and over again is: the more you define, the better it does. I find that breaking things out into individual steps is helpful. However, your mileage may vary. Things like Gastown and GetShitDone, I have not found to be particularly useful.