GoKawiilAn attempted improvement that only makes things worse. It is time we start naming this phenomenon in software engineering.
The German language has a word for what your last software update did.
It is called Verschlimmbesserung: an attempted improvement that only makes things worse.
We have all lived through the SaaS update that moved a button, renamed a menu, and broke a workflow we relied on daily. Some product team shipped a “better experience” that solved a problem nobody had.
Eliyahu Goldratt nailed the root cause decades ago:
“Tell me how you measure me, and I will tell you how I will behave. If you measure me in an illogical way… do not complain about illogical behaviour…”
When point releases become more important than the product itself, you are incentivising Verschlimmbesserung. Your engineering teams are not failing. They are optimising for the metrics you gave them.
How you measure and incentivise your teams tells them exactly what you value. If the metric rewards churn, you get churn. If the metric rewards shipping, you get shipping; whether it improves anything or not.
Is new always better? Probably not. Office 2003 is still incredibly useful because nobody forced it to constantly reinvent itself.
Stability is a feature. Knowing when not to ship is an engineering discipline.
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