creeping elegance

Describes a tendency for parts of a design to become elegant past the point of diminishing return, something which often happens at the expense of the less interesting parts of the design, the schedule, and other things deemed important in the Real World. See also creeping featurism, second-system effect, tense.

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References in periodicals archive

If you accept that technologists, by nature, gravitate to the best--and not necessarily the easiest--solutions (a process often called "creeping elegance"), it is incumbent on project management to balance risk/cost with levels of complexity/performance.

Structuring Successful Outsourced R&D Programs

* Two, set the transfer criteria's development process gate and enforce it brutally, avoiding creeping elegance. People always want to make things better while they're in the development process, and what happens is your time to market is late--and most of your margin is in that first phase of getting to market, so delaying erodes that.

Design for Manufacturability

Without vigilance, newly available technologies and market pressures will encourage the product team to enhance the concept continually, resulting in "creeping elegance." This destroys development schedules, because the team now finds itself aiming at a moving target.

Faster to market

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