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.

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