That's been my experience doing embedded stuff. Customers will tell you they want a feature. You'll implement it then find out they don't need it enough to devote resources to utilize it on their end. So then it just lingers in the code base. And never gets real world testing. Lately I've been pulling unused features and consigning the code to the land of misfit toys. Just so I don't have to maintain them.
Re:Goodbye, Clean Code
by scarface74 on Monday January 13, 2020 @10:51AM
(#22035464)
If that’s the case and they were willing to fully pay for the feature, at professional services + markup hours, it wasn’t a loss. In our case, we still got unofficially professional services and recurring subscription revenue and now we have a “referenceable client”.
If it’s behind a per client feature flag, it doesn’t cause any harm.
I would say it’s for entire features sometimes. For instance, we are a B2B company. We have features on the roadmap or a feature might be suggested by a client. Either way, you hit the jackpot if you can get one client to pay for a feature that doesn’t exist in your product that you can then sell to other clients.
The problem is that you don’t know whether the feature is generally useful to the market. But you think it might be, in that case, you build the feature in a way that is useful to the paying client and try not to do obvious things that are client specific. But until you have other clients you don’t know.