Composing Features

Writing good features is an art-form, a very new art-form that people are just beggining to explore. Of course people have been specifying how things should work throughout history, and people have been trying to specify what software should do (with varying degrees of failure!) since software has been written.

You can compare writing features to a new school of art e.g. pontillism. Pontillism built itself on the existing foundations of painting and art - in particular colour theory - and applied these using a new technique to create something a little different. In our new school of features we produce something a little different (a plain text executable) with a new tool (Cucumber) and the application of old and new techniques. To do this well we have to learn what works and what doesn't.

Asking Questions

When we write a feature we need to ask lots of questions. A feature is an exploration of something we want to do. Starting a feature is focused on two things, loosely describing the feature and asking the most important question.

• Why do we want to do this?

Feeds and shit

Feeds could be a strong competitive edge for an ecommerce platform. So we should do them properly and automate the process. If we do this then we can standardise the administration functionality to

• monitor feeds
• deal with errors
• deal with conflicts
• summarize and report on changes

Been having some problems with my main OSX86 installation, so looking to fix these by installing IPC final