As an engineer, my personal experience is that most feature creep actually comes from engineers. Marketing usually have the least idea, but engineers usually cause the "death by 1000 cuts".
I think the only time I've seen engineers add feature/code creep is when it's "filling the gaps" that others didn't think of. Many times ideas are presented to engineers in their unfinished format. It's often up to engineers and QA to find the areas where that idea needs to be fleshed out. Fleshing out an idea, I would argue, isn't feature creep but trying to make an added not suck.
Yup. When you've got a system that, as implemented, gets you 99% of the way to a nifty but unrequired feature? It's dreadfully tempting to go that last 1%. But somehow that 1% balloons into being something that you have to support and the UI turns out messier than you expected and yadda yadda yadda.
In my experience, this is usually the project managers. The engineers would love to remove the unused cruft, but the project managers don't see it as beneficial and always make other priorities.
Comments
As an engineer, my personal experience is that most feature creep actually comes from engineers. Marketing usually have the least idea, but engineers usually cause the "death by 1000 cuts".
I think the only time I've seen engineers add feature/code creep is when it's "filling the gaps" that others didn't think of. Many times ideas are presented to engineers in their unfinished format. It's often up to engineers and QA to find the areas where that idea needs to be fleshed out. Fleshing out an idea, I would argue, isn't feature creep but trying to make an added not suck.
Yup. When you've got a system that, as implemented, gets you 99% of the way to a nifty but unrequired feature? It's dreadfully tempting to go that last 1%. But somehow that 1% balloons into being something that you have to support and the UI turns out messier than you expected and yadda yadda yadda.
In my experience, this is usually the project managers. The engineers would love to remove the unused cruft, but the project managers don't see it as beneficial and always make other priorities.