Feature Creep (in a nutshell)

[Mark Kretschmann]

On Tue, Feb 9, 2010 at 5:17 PM, Mathias Panzenböck
<grosser.meister.morti at gmx.net> wrote:
> On 02/09/2010 08:42 AM, Mark Kretschmann wrote:
>> G'day,
>>
>> Seb found this gem here, I think it should become required reading for
>> all Amarok devs:
>>
>>
>> http://ignorethecode.net/blog/2010/02/02/removing-features/
>
> Oh and then there is the 80-20 rule:
> 80% of the features of an "usual" application are only needed in 20% of the
> cases. So the 20% that are used 80% of the time should be easily accessible, the
> rest should be in some "advanced" GUI (advanced-settings, -toolbar, -plasmoids).
>
> What these 20%/80% are can be detected by usage data.

Well honestly: Often a nice dose of  "common sense", combined with
developing experience, can solve a lot of questions too.

If you have a feature that is very obviously annoying then you don't
need a user survey to see that. A bunch of experienced developers can
usually tell that already.

But in some cases, such feedback can indeed be interesting, I would
agree with that. However, we already get _tons_ of feedback via forum,
emails, IRC, etc. So, it's not like we are totally oblivious of the
needs of our users.

-- 
Mark Kretschmann
Amarok Developer, Software Engineer at Collabora Ltd
Fellow of the Free Software Foundation Europe
http://amarok.kde.org - http://www.fsfe.org - http://collabora.co.uk