From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Feature creep is the proliferation of features in a product such as computer software.^[1] Extra features go beyond the basic function of the product and so can result in baroque over-complication, or "featuritis", rather than simple, elegant design.

Causes

The most common cause of feature creep is the desire to provide the consumer with a more useful or desirable product, in order to increase sales or distribution. However, once the product reaches the point at which it does everything that it is designed to do, the manufacturer is left with the choice of adding unneeded functions, sometimes at the cost of efficiency, or sticking with the old version, at the cost of a perceived lack of improvement.

Characteristics

Feature creep is the most common source of cost and schedule overruns.^[2] It thus endangers and can even kill products and projects. Apple's abandoned Copland operating system is an example of this.^{[citation needed]}

Control

Temptation of later feature creep may be avoided to some degree by basing initial design on strong software fundamentals, such as logical separation of functionality and data access. It can be actively controlled with rigorous change management and by delaying changes to later delivery phases of a project.^[3]

See also

• Mission creep
• Overengineering
• Second-system effect
• Software bloat

Mitigation

• Design document
• KISS principle
• Minimalism
• Plug-in (computing)
• Unix philosophy

References

External links

• http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?CreepingFeaturitis   (registered on October 23, 1995 at the latest.)

From Wikiquote

Featuritis, Creeping featurism or the spoonerism Feeping Creaturism, is a term used to describe software which over-emphasizes new features to the detriment of other design goals, such as simplicity, compactness, stability, or bug reduction.

Sourced

• Requests for specialized facilities and minor notational improvements are very common. When provided, they rarely fail to win applause. After all, if a feature is a direct solution to a problem and doesn’t significantly interact with other facilities, it is easy to explain, often easy to implement, and typically has a logically minimal expression leading to very concise pieces of code. People comparing languages using lists love such features. The snag is that the problems we face are essentially infinite, so we need an infinity of such specialized features.
  • Bjarne Stroustrup. "The Design of C++0x". C++ User's Journal, May 2005.

Unsourced

• The cheapest, fastest, and most reliable components are those that aren't there.
  • Gordon Bell

• There are two ways of constructing a software design; one way is to make it so simple that there are obviously no deficiencies, and the other way is to make it so complicated that there are no obvious deficiencies. The first method is far more difficult.
  • C. A. R. Hoare

• A designer knows when he has reached perfection, not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to take away.
  • Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

• Make everything as simple as possible, but not simpler.
  • Albert Einstein

• In Jeet Kune Do, one does not accumulate but eliminate. It is not daily increase but daily decrease. The height of cultivation always runs to simplicity.
  • Bruce Lee

• Feature Creep leads to Creepy Features.
  • J. Grimshaw

External links

Wikipedia has an article about:

Featuritis