Featuritis Strikes Again

I just read a old blog post by Yaron Galai at Web X.0 about the hazards of Featuritis. What is Featuritis?

From Wikipedia:

Featuritis 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.

I’ve got a huge problem with Featuritis. “If I’m already building feature ‘x’, I’ll add in feature ‘y’ and feature ‘z’, too!” Pretty soon I’m trying to maintain a bloated application with so many features no one likes to use it. Or a project gets so big and complicated I never even build it. I’ll revisit it months later and wonder why the hell I didn’t build it!

In my opinion, one of the most valuable commodities we have is time. As a solo entrepreneur, time is what limits me, so anything I can do to save time (and not waste time) is a huge boon to my business. Striking back at feature creep is something that I have gotten better at, but I always need to be wary of it.