Some well-chosen, practical words from Douglas Crockford on the dangers of overly feature-driven design:
We see a lot of feature-driven product design in which the cost of features is not properly accounted. Features can have a negative value to consumers because they make the products more difficult to understand and use…It turns out that designs that just work are much harder to produce than designs that assemble long lists of features.
Features have a specification cost, a design cost, and a development cost. There is a testing cost and a reliability cost. The more features there are, the more likely one will develop problems or will interact badly with another. In software systems, there is a storage cost, which was becoming negligible, but in mobile applications is becoming significant again. There are ascending performance costs because Moore’s Law doesn’t apply to batteries.
Features have a documentation cost…Features that offer value to a minority of users impose a cost on all users. So, in designing products and programming languages, we want to get the core features – the good parts – right because that is where we create most of the value.
Crockford, Douglas. JavaScript: The Good Parts, pp. 99-100
