Podcatcher - Sprint 1

I've made embarrassingly little progress on my podcatcher so far. My plan was to entirely read Lean Software Development before getting started, but it's taking me a while to get through the book - in a good way. I seldom read more than 5 or 7 pages before I find myself reflecting on current or past projects. This knowledge could've saved me time on previous work by making the most important & well defined features a priority - delaying discussion and decisions on the "nice to have" features until later. Some of these ideas I've stumbled on by accident or heard about from others, but it's great to have them validated and expanded into this set of lean thinking tools. I'm sure this is a book I'll reread many times in the coming years.

Anyway, I want to revisit my requirements list for the podcatcher, prioritize the features, and define the features for my first sprint. Here are the requirements for the podcatcher from a previous post, roughly ordered by importance.
  • Subscribe to podcasts via RSS.
  • Download only show descriptions (if this is not the default). Otherwise add functionality to download the entire show. Make this configurable by show.
  • Delete podcasts (including descriptions).
  • Build user interface
  • Import OPML files from iTunes.
  • Ability to set the genre (or other metadata) for the shows.
  • Enable playlist creation
  • Allow the creation of a "favorites list" with user notes or labels and a URL to the show.

The overall goal is to have the podcatcher "live" on the MP3 player or other removable drive so keeping the footprint of the application small will be very important. I'll be monitoring this very closely.

One other note, the user interface is something I've been thinking a lot about lately. I'd like the look and feel to be a native as possible to where the application is running. I know Ruby has a Tk extension bundled with it and I've found some other options, but none look as robust as the Eclipse RCP platform I've worked with previously. I really want to code this in Ruby, so an option may be to use JRuby, with Eclipse for the final solution. I'm going to keep looking and will try out a bunch of options to see which is the best fit for what I want.

Here's what I hope to accomplish in the next week or two, in the first sprint
  • Download, install, and start to learn RSpec. RSPec is a behavior driven development framework that I'm hoping to use to describe and test the behavior of the podcather.
  • Define behaviors for downloading podcasts via RSS.
  • Code these behaviors.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

I Believe...

A recent reorg at my company left me with a new manager - and a different approach to software development than my team had been previously following.  Our new approach is one that I don’t necessarily agree with, but it led me to think about - and reevaluate -  those tenets of software development that I think are important and that I believe lead to increased quality and productivity. This post will consist of fairly high level discussions about how to organize code, teams, and projects - but contain very little actual code. Many of these ideas will not be my own.  They are mostly ideas I’ve learned from others and their willingness to share their experiences with me.  They are, however, ideas that I’ve practiced and hardened as I’ve worked to build my own ideal environment for delivering value through software . Many of these ideas I now take for granted as commonplace (even though they aren’t).  I felt a need to document them anyway - so people can understand what to expect (a
Read more

Performance Tuning JCAPS - Part 2

It's been close to 2 months since my first Performance Tuning JCAPS post. Since then, we've noticed our servers running out of TCP connections under heavy load. Researching this problem, we learned that the JCAPS' JMS server makes heavy use of TCP in implementing Request/Reply queues . We approached Sun for guidance and they assured us that they've had success implementing high throughput applications using the JMS request reply solution... but how? It appears a multi-step solution is needed. First, running out of TCP connections in a scenario like ours is a JCAPS bug addressed in an ESR (110348) and rolled into JCAPS 5.1.3 Update Release 3 . We installed this update and noticed a marked improvement. Running my simple 75 user simulated test, transactions took 2521 ms to round trip (compared to the previous time of 20128ms). While this is great improvement, an average of 2.5 seconds is still really slow for this simple transaction. We reported our findings to Su
Read more

FRail :include

I really like developing with Rails, but I've been frustrated the last few days by some things Rails should do quite easily, yet doesn't. I've already written here and here about some of my struggles with Rails :include clause. Here's one more... Let's say you have a has-and-belongs-to-many relationship. If you :include this relationship in a find query, Rails will automatically create the join clause including the lookup table! That's cool. Unfortunately, it looks as if only the :include clause provides this piece of functionality. Why isn't the same functionality provided via the :join clause or through a general purpose module? This doesn't make any sense to me! I'm working on a database application where I don't need to display a lot of data, but the data displayed is heavily filtered by it's connections to other information in the database. I need to join a lot of tables to perform the filtering operation and using :include
Read more