It’s been a while since I’ve written a blog post, and I want to start again. I’ve been VERY busy at work, and I’m not sure what I should do technically in my spare time… I have a Cozma (By Anki: https://www.youtube.com/user/AnkiInc), so I have a plan to try to use the SDK. Hopefully in the future I will have interesting blog posts of little Naonao (name given by my wife).

Since the Cozmo SDK work is for a different day, I decided to talk about a subject near and dear to everyone’s heart: Feature Creep.

Now, there’s two kind of feature creep, one is given externally. For example, a client comes up and says:

“Could we add this small little feature?”

As we know, the feature is rarely small, and it’s rarely something we have budgeted. This leads us to prioritize, budget, and possibly cut corners!

I stated two kind of feature creep, whats the second? As developers we dream up cool and interesting ideas. Sure, we have to do a, but wouldn’t it be great if we could also install a kitchen sink? Maybe our program could build the kitchen sink!!! While what we want to do is usually possibly, does it make sense? Should we do it? This is a question I have a hard time with. I want to have my sink and eat it to!!! (I think I lost my idiom somewhere…)

The second kind is usually where I get stuck. As I’m working on a problem I either find a large chunk of code that could be changed, or I have this cool idea for how to do more then we are currently doing, and more is better! So I plan how to do this more. At first I think it’s a few extra days, until I realize 10 other people will be affected. Soon I’m working across teams and trying to evangelize my project. If only everyone could see the beauty of this little change we could all have brand new sinks!

After talking to people, we realize what I thought was a small change, may turn out to be months of work :(, not something I can really do. Whats the moral of this story?

It’s great to have ambition, dreams and interesting ideas. It’s great to, if your allowed, go off and try to accomplish them. You have to remember, though, there is work to do, and maybe the sink in the kitchen is already what we need.