Creeping featurism

From Free net encyclopedia

Image:MSWord.PNGCreeping featurism, or creeping featuritis, is a phrase used to describe software which over-emphasizes new features to the detriment of other design goals, such as simplicity, compactness, stability, or bug reduction.

Creeping featurism is often accompanied by the mistaken belief that "one small feature" will add zero incremental cost to a project, where cost can be money, time, effort, or energy. A related term, feature creep, describes the tendency for a software project's completion to be delayed by the temptation to keep adding new features, without a specific goal.

Creeping featurism is an example of an anti-pattern.

This phrase is sometimes rendered as the spoonerism "feeping creaturism". The spoonerism "creature feep" also appears.

Creeping featurism is usually associated with marketing, sales, or program management roles. However, developers are not immune to letting features creep in to a software product; many people criticize Emacs as being a prime example of creeping featurism. Emacs proponents, however, tout Emacs' all-in-one nature as one of its primary benefits. Multi-paradigm languages such as [[C++]] have also faced such criticism.

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Related quotes

"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

"Perfection is achieved, 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

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