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There are plenty of cases where exceeding the requirement is cheaper / easier / simpler than to try to match it more closely because you have some common and st
by byroot 5y ago
There are plenty of cases where exceeding the requirement is cheaper / easier / simpler than to try to match it more closely because you have some common and standard, hence cheaper, parts available.
So IMHO over and under engineering doesn't refer to the requirements, but to the engineering effort deployed.
What developers often refer to as YAGNI and KISS.
- YZF 5y agoI agree the terminology is sometimes used in this sense. Though if there is a bigger engineering effort it's often because the engineers are attempting to go beyond the requirements. I.e. the requirements may be satisfied with SQLlite on a raspberry Pi but the engineer builds a large distributed system that runs in the Cloud. This could just be because they have no idea what they're doing, or it could be because they're intentionally building something beyond what is asked. It's definitely possible to build more complicated systems that just barely satisfy the same requirement that a simpler system would satisfy. I'm tempted to call this "bad engineering" rather than "over engineering".