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Useless Features Are The Biggest Bugs
How misaligned features can be the biggest ‘bugs’ in software development.
This concept is something that I found nowhere else. So simple and so misplaced that it is not part of any manual about software development. Yet, it does not matter how much we invest in QA, fixing bugs, and choosing the right architecture; without first addressing the biggest ‘bug’ in software development, everything else is nothing but effort wasted.

Just picture this: You have got the most precious software development process, and everything is on track. Your business team has crafted the most refined and well specified feature. The three amigos have met and written the best possible scenarios. Developers have diligently implemented each of one of them with TDD. QA has refined and rigorously tested, helping developers to polish every detail. And now your software is ready. And you deploy it. But, nothing happens. It turns out that that feature was useless for the user: the feature failed to meet the actual user needs.
So, who failed in this scenario?
Who truly failed?
It is evident that in this scenario, it was the business team who failed.
However, somehow, we often do not recognize this misalignment as a significant bug. Not even close. We do not give it the same level of attention or resources. Although we allocate extensive budgets to control every aspect of software quality from a development standpoint, we frequently overlook the fundamental possibility of failing in deciding which features are most crucial.
And let’s state the obvious: this oversight is arguably the costliest kind of failure in software development. It is not just about the resources wasted on developing the wrong feature; and it is not even the cost of creating the right one after this one failed; it is also about the lost opportunity cost.
Every day spent on the wrong feature is a day losing its corresponding revenue, plus it provides competitors with the opportunity to catch up.