Microsoft Word with all features activated

Creeping featurism, or creeping featuritis, is a phrase used to describe software which over-emphasizes new features to the detriment of other design goals, such as simplicity, compactness, stability, or bug reduction. This is a screenshot of copyrighted computer software. ... This is a screenshot of copyrighted computer software. ... Microsoft Word is a word processing application from Microsoft. ... Computer software (or simply software) refers to one or more computer programs and data held in the storage of a computer for some purpose. ... In geographic information systems, a feature comprises an item of feature data. ... Software engineering (SE) is the profession concerned with specifying, designing, developing and maintaining software applications by applying technologies and practices from computer science, project management, and other fields. ... Simplicity is the property, condition, or quality of being simple or un-combined. ... The compactness theorem is a basic fact in symbolic logic and model theory and asserts that a set (possibly infinite) of first-order sentences is satisfiable, i. ... The word stability has a number of technical meanings, all related to the common meaning of the word. ... A computer bug is an error, flaw, mistake, failure, or fault in a computer program that prevents it from working as intended, or produces an incorrect result. ...

Creeping featurism 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. A related term, feature creep, describes the tendency for a software project's completion to be delayed by the temptation to keep adding new features, without a specific goal.

Creeping featurism is an example of an anti-pattern. Anti-patterns, also referred to as pitfalls, are classes of commonly-reinvented bad solutions to problems. ...

This phrase is sometimes rendered as the spoonerism "feeping creaturism", which brings up the image of each new feature being a small creature which runs around going "feep, feep". The term "creature feep" also appears. A Spoonerism is a play on words in which corresponding consonants or vowels are switched (see metathesis), named after the Reverend William Archibald Spooner (1844–1930), Warden of New College, Oxford, who was notoriously prone to this tendency. ...

Creeping featurism is usually associated with marketing, sales, or program management roles. However, developers are not immune to letting features creep in to a software product; many people criticize Emacs as being a prime example of creeping featurism. Emacs proponents, however, tout Emacs' all-in-one nature as one of its primary benefits. Multi-paradigm languages such as C++ have also faced such criticism.     This article is about the text editor. ... C++ (pronounced see plus plus, IPA: ) is a general-purpose computer programming language. ...

See also

• Functionality creep, when a physical document or other non-computer related procedure ends up serving unexpected or unplanned purposes.
• Scope creep, when the features of a project gradually increase.
• Software bloat, the inefficient use of memory and storage space.
• Design document, which should prevent feature creep (if done well)
• Mission Creep, similar phenomenon in the military

Functionality creep is what occurs when an item, process, or procedure designed for a specific purpose ends up serving another purpose for which it was not intended. ... Scope Creep in project management refers to uncontrolled changes in a projects scope. ... In geographic information systems, a feature comprises an item of feature data. ... A project is a temporary endeavor undertaken to create a unique product or service. ... Software bloat is a derogatory term used to describe the tendency of newer computer programs to use larger amounts of system resources (mass storage space, processing power and/or RAM) than older programs. ... A design document is a detailed description of a software product that a software designer writes in order to give a large software development team a solid reference on what theyre doing. ... Mission creep is the expansion of a project or mission beyond its original goals, often after initial successes. ...

External links

• The Interaction-Design.org Encyclopedia entry on Creeping Featurism (Featuritis)
• Creeping Featuritis article from the Pattern Repository's Wiki