Adding a new feature in 60 minutes

Today was the first day after my vacation, at work. Most of the time is spent on planning and discussions how we’re going to move forward with the product. But I did manage to get some code in place.

During the discussions we also figured out a way to deliver some value to our customers in a minor feature. The initial idea was to create an excel spreadsheet that could fetch the data needed from our REST service, to create a report. This isn’t what were doing.

Instead were allowing printing on some new entities in the domain, extending our printing feature to be able to produce the desired output. This was roughly one hours work for me, as the printing feature was built just for this type of extension. Along with a change-set I had I could also add the ability to print entities by right-clicking on the anywhere in the application.

Now the extension points working in a design is one thing. But the design of this particular feature caused quite a bit of commotion in the days it was implemented (It touched on breaking DRY, since the presentation models for printing were closely similar to the entities). So it’s comforting to see that the design is holding up even as the feature grows.