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

Answer 1

If you spend so much time thinking about the possible ramifications of a problem that you end up interfering with the solving of the problem itself, you may be over-engineering.

There's a fine balance between "best engineering practices" and "real world applicability". At some point you have to decide that even though a particular solution may not be as "pure" from an engineering standpoint as it could be, it will do the job.

For example:

If you are designing a user management system for one-time use at a high school reunion, you probably don't need to add support for incredibly long names, or funky character sets. Setting a reasonable maximum length and doing some basic sanitizing should be sufficient. On the other hand, if you're creating a system that will be deployed for hundreds of similar events, you might want to spend some more time on the problem.

It's all about the appropriate level of effort for the task at hand.

Answer 2

To me it is anything that would add any more fat to the code. Meat would be any code that will do the job according to the spec and fat would be any code that would bloat the code in a way that it just adds more complexity. The programmer might have been expecting a future expansion of the functionality; but still it is fat.!

Answer 3

When your design actually makes things more complex instead of simplifying things, you’re overengineering.

More on this at:

http://www.codesimplicity.com/post/what-is-overengineering/

Answer 4

I'm afraid that a precise definition is probably not possible as it's highly dependent on the context. For example, it's much easier to over-engineer a web site that displays glittering ponies than it is a nuclear power plant control system. Redundancies, excessive error checking, highly instrumented logging facilities are all over-engineering for a glittering ponies app, but not for a nuclear power plant control system. I think the best you can do is have a feeling about when you are applying too much overhead to your features for the purpose of the application.

Note that I would distinguish between gold-plating and over-engineering. In my mind, gold-plating is creating features that weren't asked for and will never be used. Over-engineering is more about how much "safety" you build into the application either by coding checks around the code or using excessive design for a simple task.

Answer 5

Disclaimer #1: I am a big-picture BA. I know no code. I read this site all the time. This is my first post.

Funny I was just told by my boss that I over-engineered a new software produce we're planning for mentoring (target market HR people). So I came here to look up the term.

They want to get something in place to sell now, re-purposing existing tools. I can't help but sit back and think, fewer signups, lower retention, if it doesn't allow some of the flexibility we talked about. And mainly, have a highly visual UI that a monkey could use.

He said we could plan future phases to improve the product, especially the UI. We have current customers waiting on "future improvements" that we still aren't doing. They need it though, truly need it.

I am in the process of resigning so I didn't push back.

But my definition would be.............making sure it only does as little as possible, for as cheap as possible, and still be passable for the thing you say it is. Beyond that is over engineering.

Disclaimer #2: This site helped me land my next job implementing a more configurable software.

Answer 6

My rough definition would be 'Providing functionality that isnt needed to meet the requirements spec'