Functionality

                   Functionality is the extent of possibilities provided by a system.One of the most difficult problems facing a project leader is to know how much functionality is enough. The pressure for more facilities, known in industry parlance as featurism is constantly there. Its consequences are bad for internal projects, where the pressure comes from users within the same company, and worse for commercial products, as the most prominent part of a journalist’s comparative review is often the table listing side by side the features offered by competing products.

                    Featurism is actually the combination of two problems, one more difficult than the other. The easier problem is the loss of consistency that may result from the addition of new features, affecting its ease of use. Users are indeed known to complain that all the “bells and whistles” of a product’s new version make it horrendously complex. Such comments should be taken with a grain of salt, however, since the new features do not come out of nowhere: most of the time they have been requested by users other users.What to me looks like a superfluous trinket may be an indispensable facility to you.

             The solution here is to work again and again on the consistency of the overall product, trying to make everything fit into a general mold. A good software product is based on a small number of powerful ideas; even if it has many specialized features,they should all be explainable as consequences of these basic concepts. The “grand plan” must be visible, and everything should have its place in it.

                 This method is tougher to enforce on a day-to-day basis because of the pressures mentioned, but yields a more effective software process and often a better product in the end. Even if the final result is the same, as assumed in the figure, it should be reached sooner.Following the suggested path also means that the decision to release an early version at one of the points marked by colored squares in the figure becomes, if not easier, at least simpler.It will be based on your assessment of whether what you have so far covers a large enough share of the full feature set to attract prospective customers rather than drive them away.