How to write a new authoring tool in Agile

or how to avoid to have wordpad for the price of word, or how to avoid to have word when you want a tool to edit math over the web

If I have to do such stuff (wonder how such idea come to me ? ), I’ll in the following order :

1. Look for standard dealing with the subject and I’ll find MathML . (Don’t want to make the wheel again to store my Data)
2. Understand than an authoring storage format differ of the display format (DOC/PDF, …) indeed, all authoring tool need to store meta data (author, revision, pagination, …, revision, …)
3. Try to find the need of my user (print the page, copy/paste in/from word/office/firefox/IE/…)
4. Try to cleary define what i want

So, my first backlog (list of tasks, will look like ) :

1. Setup My continuous integration env
2. provide a simple GUI with ‘/’/division nice display
3. provide print function
4. provide copy/paste function from word

I think quite quickly, I’ll have to add matrix/vector/square/root fonction display,

but what about spell checker ? pagination ? indeed, for my user, what’s the most important ? currently no clue of it, and I’ll say, don’t think to much at the question before the first proto. Human are so strange, than the need can come from nowhere …..

May be, import text from forum, internet, or paste to forum will be the key requirement.

After, from a technical point of view, as I know i’ll need to include most of a standard authoring tools fonctionnality, will I make the wheel again, or will I extend a standard tools ? (word/office),  extend a wiki like tool ? extend a forum tool ? use the remote publication mode of word/office/wiki ?  Will I force my user to be online to edit content, of will I allow offline authoring ? ……

Lot of question/answers I’ll have after the first prototype….

So, as a first conclusion, doing a quick/rapid prototype seems to be a key success factor in this area.

Agility will help me to focus on the most valuable features to my end user, and to deliver on a regular basis working prototypes.