When is something worth implementing
— February 28 2010
Cucumber is one of the wonderful libraries we use to develop Teambox. The philosophy behind it is defining what the code should do, and then making your code satisfy those conditions.
That way, it doesn’t matter what’s beneath. Only the results matter, and you’ll be sure it doesn’t break. This is known as Behavior Driven Development.
Thanks to Cucumber, I found a great piece of insight:
Business value and Minimum Marketable Features
Before adding any feature to your design, you should ask yourself “why should I do this?“. If it responds to any of the following, you’re in the right direction:
- Protect revenue.
- Increase revenue.
- Manage cost.
- Increase brand value.
- Make the product remarkable.
- Provide more value to your customers.
An example given in their site is explaining why a site like Youtube should have a login feature:
In order to drive more people to the website and earn more admoney, authors should have to login, so that the content can be displayed with the author and appear more trustworthy.
Before adding a link to your Terms and Conditions, ask yourself why. Before adding JS animations. Before setting up a menu with 10 tabs. You’ll find out which your core features are, and what you can get rid of.
Chances are this will help you building something easier to understand and less complex to make.
> Cucumber’s site.
> Popping the why stack