Designing for deletion

Mon, 11 Oct 2021 09:15:00 +0100

A few months ago my team had to kill a feature. Nothing dramatic; a half-finished onboarding flow product had quietly stopped believing in. The ticket said “remove the new welcome wizard.” I estimated two days. It took three weeks.

The wizard itself was about 400 lines. The reason it took three weeks is that those 400 lines had grown roots. A flag on the user record. A column in the analytics table. Three branches in the auth middleware. A template partial pulled into the main layout. A background job that “would be useful for other things later.” A helper in internal/util that nine packages now imported. By the time we’d traced every tendril the diff touched 60 files and the review thread looked like a hostage negotiation.

Software Design on Segflow

Designing for deletion