Developable surfaces have many desired properties in manufacturing process. Since most existing CAD systems utilize parametric surfaces as the design primitive, there is a great demand in industry to convert a parametric surface within a prescribed global error bound into developable patches. In this work we propose a simple and efficient solution to approximate a general parametric surface with a minimum set of C0-joint developable strips. The key contribution of the proposed algorithm is that, several global optimization problems are elegantly solved in a sequence that offers a controllable global error bound on the developable surface approximation. Experimental results are presented to demonstrate the effectiveness and stability of the proposed algorithm.