Cote’s Weblog

Corporations are beginning to take the 90 percent rule to heart, too, often as a result of deciding to dump massive roll-in-the-cots-and-build-a-new-wing monolithic software implementations in favor of hosted options.

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The software as service guys aren’t apologetic about what they offer, either…. Their strategy is all about leveraging a 90 percent solution across as many customers as possible. Custom code just gets in the way of profits—the exact opposite of what your average monolithic software company is thinking, where the base code is often seen as the toehold that leads to the lifelong engagement. –“When Good Enough Is Good Enough”

Software people do, indeed, get obsessed with getting a 100% solution. As Lindquist points out, it’s pretty much the modus operandi of large software companies. Not fulfilling that last 10% is seen as too risky, and the lumbering giants are anything but risk takers.

Fling-flangs & Dandy-dangs

When developing “Enterprise Software,” its like that song:

Every feature is sacred.
Every feature is great.
If a feature is wasted,
God gets quite irate.

We all know how that goes: “if only you damn programmers had implement the fling-flang for the dandy-dang, we could have closed this sale for millions! We need those fling-flangs! Now, why don’t you just start working 60 hour weeks to do that. You think my green-fees pay for themselves, dumbshits?! Jesus!”

That is, there’s also the perception that what’s missing (that last 10%) would have made an ass-load of cash. It’s a good move on the sales-people’s part: it’s impossible to prove if those missing features would bring in the payola , before-hand or afterwards.

On the other hand, all of us dumb coders could fill volumes with lists of features we spent time implementing that didn’t result in more moist bags of cash from customers. Those features are innumerable.

Sucker Fish Features

The kicker with a “dead-weight” feature like those is that they’re parasitic: you have to maintain and support those features. They’re rarely killed. So, as a product matures, going through many different releases, the team has to tend to all those vestigial features with the same amount of attention as they do the money-maker features.

So, it’s little wonder that, when given a set of requirements, one of the first things us code-monkeys ask is, “what can we cut?”

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