At the moment I'm in the process of testing Bamboo and, as part of that, of deploying a large-ish number of test agents across a number of platforms. Something I have to do every time is to set capabilities like architecture, operating system, operating system release, compilers installed, etc, etc. This capabilities are used then by the test plans to find the right agent. This is a tedious and error-prone work that has to be done every time a new agent is created. The agents already do a good work of finding out some capabilities (like JVM version or shells) but I think this should be extended:

1) Including most useful system properties from the agent's JVM, like architecture, OS, etc
2) Including environment variables from the agent's host
3) Including some basic platform specific checks (perhaps "uname -a" if a UNIX, "rpm -qa" if RPM is installed, "cat /etc/*-release" to find out the Linux distribution, etc, etc)
4) Providing a well-know extension point for custom capabilities (what about running by default, if present, something like ${agent.home}/extension/customCapabilities.sh that would return to the agent through stdout a properties stream including any desired custom capabilities).

Please tell me what you think about this.