(continued from Attack Yak; series begins with Taxonomy of Yak Shaving) Sometimes you’re coding along, writing tests as little experiments “this should fail because I haven’t implemented the parser for it yet” — and it fails in a way you didn’t expect. And then you start digging and the parsing…
(This post describes the first yak category. You might choose to start with the Taxonomy of Yak Shaving intro.)
Yak Shaving is: doing seemingly-unrelated tasks to get some real task done.
The name has obscure roots and doesn’t matter; the key is that it makes you think, “Why would you do that?”