What is “over-engineering” as applied to software? [closed]

Answer 1

I think they are the same as Gold plating and being hit by the Golden hammer :)

Basically, you can sit down and spent too much time trying to make a perfect design, without ever writing some code to check out how it works. Any agile method will tell you not to do all your design up-front, and to just create chunks of design, implement it, reiterate over it, re-design, go again, etc...

Answer 2

This relates to my controversial programming opinion of "The simplest approach is always the best approach".

Answer 3

Contrary to most answers, I do not believe that "presently unneeded functionality" is over-engineering; or it is the least problematic form.

Like you said, the worst kind of over-engineering is usually committed in the name of future-proofing and extensibility - and achieves the exact opposite:

• Empty layers of abstraction that are at best unnecessary and at worst restrict you to a narrow, inefficient use of the underlying API.
• Code littered with designated "extension points" such as protected methods or components acquired via abstract factories - which all turn out to be not quite what you actually need when you do have to extend the functionality.
• Making everything configurable to "avoid hard-coding", with the effect that there's more (complex, failure-prone) application logic in configuration files than in source code.
• Over-genericizing: instead of implementing the (technically uninteresting) functional spec, the developer builds a (technically interesting) "business rule engine" that "executes" the specs themselves as supplied by business users. The net result is an interpreter for a proprietary (scripting or domain-specific) language that is usually horribly designed, has no tool support and is so hard to use that no business user could ever work with it.

The truth is that the design that is most easily adapted to new and changing requirements (and is thus the most future-proof and extensible) is the design that is as simple as possible.

Answer 4

The beauty of Agile programming is that it's hard to over engineer if you do it right.

Answer 5

In the cases where we've considered things over engineered, it's always been describing software that has been designed to be so generic that it loses sight of the main task that it was initially designed to perform, and has therefore become not only hard to use, but fundimentally unintelligent.

Answer 6

The agile answer to this question is: every piece of code that does not contribute to the requested functionality.