Featuritis

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OpenOffice.org Writer with all toolbars activated exhibits the creeping featurism necessary to meet the modern expectations of word processors.

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.

Featuritis 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 or scope 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.

Featuritis is an example of an anti-pattern.

Featuritis 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.

Featuritis and the associated scope creep can endanger and even kill entire projects. Apple Computer's Copland software is an example of this, as feature creep continuously delayed the project.

[edit] Related quotes

Wikiquote has a collection of quotations related to:

Featuritis

"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