Creeping Featurism

Definitions

1. The gradual accumulation of features in a program until its complexity overwhelms its usefulness, with each addition individually reasonable and the aggregate indefensible. The pathology is social as much as technical: no single request is worth refusing, and no one owns the total. Related forms include 'creeping elegance', in which a designer keeps refining architecture past the point of return, and 'feeping creaturism', a spoonerism that hackers use with obvious affection. The concept anticipates modern discussions of scope creep and software bloat by several decades.