Yeah, I thought that point might be confusing because I wasn't clear. You're right limiting the scope could reduce dev time and it might often be a welcome suggestion. It doesn't always go that way though and some proposals for modifying the functionality are costly because they can require re-architecting the design even before development starts.
Usually, lightening the ship by throwing functionality overboard in a panic doesn't happen until around half way through a project, but what I was referring to was the sort of impractical proposals that come from non-developers about how to reduce development time.
"Couldn't we remove the ability to customize user icons--everyone in the icon based user view can have the same icon." Okay, why have icons at all if every icon is identical?
"Deadlock, what's that?, do we really have to detect it in the first release?" Hmm...
"Can we leave out distributed shared virtual memory segments?" They weren't included in the original sizing
"Do we have to do persistent client caching?" Well then we will be no better than competing products.
"Does X have to run over both UDP and TCP?" That was originally a requirement. We can go back and examine that in light of other parts of the system depending on X.
Usually, lightening the ship by throwing functionality overboard in a panic doesn't happen until around half way through a project, but what I was referring to was the sort of impractical proposals that come from non-developers about how to reduce development time.
"Couldn't we remove the ability to customize user icons--everyone in the icon based user view can have the same icon." Okay, why have icons at all if every icon is identical?
"Deadlock, what's that?, do we really have to detect it in the first release?" Hmm...
"Can we leave out distributed shared virtual memory segments?" They weren't included in the original sizing
"Do we have to do persistent client caching?" Well then we will be no better than competing products.
"Does X have to run over both UDP and TCP?" That was originally a requirement. We can go back and examine that in light of other parts of the system depending on X.