One popular way to view an application is as a collection of features. What are features? Features allow our application to be useful, or may even be its reason for existing. Consider the ubiquitous text editor—a pretty simple application at first glance. It not only lets us edit text, but also open, save, and print files. Of course features can have sub‑features; text editing will also include things like cut, copy, and paste, spell check, formatting, etc.
Thinking of an application in terms of features (sub-features, and sub-sub-features) allows us to break down our projects into chunks or tasks, which are much easier to manage. Of course some features will be inter-dependent, but we should consider them independent and move to the next one only when one has been completed. If the feature we want to work on depends on another feature, then we need to complete that feature. Refer back to Chapter 1 and see how thinking in terms of features fits well into our introduction...