Way back when I was working on Excel 5, our initial feature list was huge and would have gone way over schedule. “Oh my!” we thought. “Those are all super important features! How can we live without a macro editing wizard?”
As it turns out, we had no choice, and we cut what we thought was “to the bone” to make the schedule. Everybody felt unhappy about the cuts. To make people feel better, we told ourselves that we weren’t cutting the features, we were simply deferring them to Excel 6.
As Excel 5 was nearing completion, I started working on the Excel 6 spec with a colleague, Eric Michelman. We sat down to go through the list of “Excel 6” features that had been punted from the Excel 5 schedule. Guess what? It was the shoddiest list of features you could imagine. Not one of those features was worth doing. I don’t think a single one of them ever was. The process of culling features to fit a schedule was the best thing we could have done. If we hadn’t done this, Excel 5 would have taken twice as long and included 50% useless crap features that would have had to be supported, for backwards compatibility, until the end of time.
| Author | Joel Spolsky |
| Work | Evidence Based Scheduling |