Problem
Potential Problems:No clear starting point: Building a net-new feature from scratch is overwhelming without a structured process, and teams often skip critical steps like requirements gathering or risk assessment.Incomplete or inconsistent planning: Features get built without a fully thought-through plan, leading to rework, missed integrations, and surprises late in the process.Repetitive boilerplate setup: Scaffolding modules, rules, and workflows by hand is tedious, error-prone, and eats into time better spent on actual business logic.Deployments that fail silently: Without rigorous pre-deployment checks, broken configurations make it to production and cause hard-to-diagnose issues.Fragile end-to-end testing: Writing and maintaining E2E tests for complex order flows is time-consuming, and failures often lack enough context to diagnose quickly.Lost progress when context switches: Developers who step away from a feature mid-build often struggle to pick up exactly where they left off, especially across sessions or team handoffs.Product asks for a new Return Order capability. You need new workflows, custom rules, settings, and deployment — the full lifecycle.
Solution Overview
Building a brand new feature in Fluent Commerce follows a structured, guided journey from initial idea through to verified deployment. Rather than jumping straight into code, the process begins by clearly defining what the feature actually needs to do. A discovery process walks through the key dimensions of the feature, which entities are involved, what the business rules are, how statuses should progress, and where external systems need to connect. The result is a written specification with a completeness score, so you know whether you have enough detail to proceed confidently.With a solid spec in place, the tool generates a comprehensive implementation plan — covering architecture, workflow changes, every rule that needs to be built or configured, deployment sequencing, and a test plan. You review and approve this plan before anything gets built, and can ask questions or request changes before committing.Once approved, the actual build begins in a logical sequence. The module structure is created first, followed by the individual custom rules, each generated with the appropriate scaffolding and test skeletons already in place. The workflow itself is then assembled and automatically validated for structural issues before you ever attempt a deployment.Before anything touches your environment, a thorough set of quality checks runs across the entire package, verifying that the module, workflow, settings, and environment are all in a fit state to deploy. Only once those gates are cleared does the deployment proceed, pushing both the module and workflow and confirming the deployed versions match what was built.Finally, an automated end-to-end test walks through the feature as a real order would experience it, firing events and checking that statuses transition correctly at every step. If anything fails, the tool diagnoses the root cause, applies a fix, rebuilds, redeploys, and retests, repeating until everything passes.Importantly, none of this progress is lost if you step away. The feature's current state is tracked throughout, so you can pick up exactly where you left off without needing to re-explain anything to the tool.Solution
