XYplorer Beta Club

Feature creep is the destiny of most software that's good enough to get continued attention by makers and users. I think the reasons for this are obvious. My question now is: Is is really a law? "Add features or perish." Or do you know of any successful software that has drawn a line: "This is it. It's perfect. The rest is bug fixes." ?

Curious,
Don

admin wrote:Or do you know of any successful software that has drawn a line: "This is it. It's perfect. The rest is bug fixes." ?

Not really...the closest I can think of are things like the OS and MS Office where features are relatively fixed but then there is a major overhaul ever few years...I think any product that is used by millions of users and/or has a high cost factor are more likely to remain stable because of the impact of making changes is much greater.

One of the main selling points about XY that I use is how it's constantly evolving in response to user needs and that's what makes it unique...Other FM's may take months to even fix a bug and having gotten used to Don's speed of fixes has made me frustrated with some other non-FM appl's that are more typical in terms of response.

Yes, but there are important downsides to constant development (in the sense of adding stuff), and that's why it's called "Feature creep":

1) The average percentage of used features in relation to existing features gets smaller and smaller. A program of which I will use only 10% of the features is less attractive.

2) Constant development means constant learning on the side of the upgrading user. Migration fatigue sets in... She wants to upgrade because a certain bug got finally fixed, but she does not want all the new stuff (and new bugs) that come with the upgrade. Stress...

3) Users, and more so companies, might perceive the product as unfinished.

I think one should be careful not to add too much stuff, a reason why some softwares are termed bloat. But so far with XY I have seen things that improve usability without sacrificing much speed or being overkill. Every few month devs should pay close attention to GUI and shape it in a user-friendly way. But at the same time it should not stop devs to be creative and give users some revolutionary features. Example: minitree. If Don would provide exact same features as other FMs then we'd have never seen minitree.
I would say right amount of feature additions and attention to GUI is the key.

1) it´s better to have a software that does the 10% i need like no one else available; otherwise, why bother as there are so many flavors out there?

2) is this meant to be a techie oriented or a whole world savior software? From all i´ve read this far in several posts my impression is that this is a heavy user, ever-learning oriented software

3) or a dead product, OTOH. Not easy, i mean.