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Feature Drift Risk

Risk that the features required by clients will change and evolve over time.

Part Of

Reduced By Practices

  • Marketing: Make the most of market opportunities while they exist.

Attendant To Practices

Feature Drift Risk

Feature Drift is the tendency that the features people need change over time.

For example, at one point in time, supporting IE6 was right up there for website developers, but it's not really relevant anymore. The continual improvements we see in processor speeds and storage capacity of our computers is another example: the Wii was hugely popular in the early 2000's, but expectations have moved on now.

The point is: what users want today might not make it to tomorrow. This is especially true in the fast-paced world of IT. Over time, the market evolves and becomes more discerning. This happens in several ways:

  • Features present in competitors' versions of the software become the baseline, and they're expected to be available in your version.
  • Certain ways of interacting become the norm (e.g. querty keyboards, or the control layout in cars: these don't change with time).
  • Features decline in usefulness: Printing is less important now than it was, for example.

As shown in the diagram, saving your project from Feature Drift Risk means further design and development. But trying to keep up with users' changing demands can re-introduce Conceptual Integrity Risk back into your project.

Sometimes, the only way to go is to start again with a clean sheet by some distruptive innovation.

Feature Drift Risk is not the same thing as Requirements Drift, which is the tendency projects have to expand in scope as they go along. There are lots of reasons they do that, a key one being the Hidden Risks uncovered on the project as it progresses.