Comparison
Gold platingvsOver-engineering
Gold plating
the ticket was done on Tuesday and you spent Thursday adding polish nobody asked for.
Continuing to add refinement past the point the requirement was met. It differs from over-engineering in motive: over-engineering is fear of the future, gold plating is craft or boredom aimed at something no user values. It shows up in delivery arguments because the cost is not the extra work but the schedule it silently consumed, which nobody agreed to spend.
Full entry →Over-engineering
the design handles ten thousand requests a second and the product has forty users.
Solving a larger or more general problem than the one you have. It usually comes from an honest place — anticipated scale, imagined reuse, a previous job's scars — and it is expensive twice, once to build and again every time someone has to work through it. The direct question that settles it is what would break at the actual current numbers, said out loud, with the numbers.
Full entry →