Mythical OSS beasts – feature removal releases

Life can be improved by adding, or by subtracting. The world pushes us to add, because that benefits them. But the secret is to focus on subtracting…

No amount of adding will get me where I want to be. The adding mindset is deeply ingrained. It’s easy to think I need something else. It’s hard to look instead at what to remove.

The least successful people I know run in conflicting directions, drawn to distractions, say yes to almost everything, and are chained to emotional obstacles.

The most successful people I know have a narrow focus, protect against time-wasters, say no to almost everything, and have let go of old limiting beliefs.”
Derek Sivers, here.

I’m really curious here. Have you ever heard of an OSS product team removing a feature? Nope?? Me either!

I’ve seen products re-factored, resulting in changes to features. I’ve also seen products obsoleted and their replacements not offer all of the same features. But what about a version upgrade to an existing OSS product that has features subtracted? That never happens does it?? The adding mindset is deeply ingrained.

So let’s say we do want to go on a subtraction drive and remove some of the clutter from our OSS. I know plenty of OSS GUIs where subtraction is desperately needed BTW! But how do we know what to remove?

I have no data to back this up, but I would guess that almost every OSS would have certain functions that are not used, by any of their customers, in a whole year. That functionality was probably built for a specific use-case for a specific customer that no longer has relevance. Perhaps for a service type that is no longer desired by the market or a network type that will never be used again.

Question is, does your OSS have profiling instrumentation that allows you to measure what functionality is and isn’t used across your whole client base?

Can your products team readily produce a usage profile graph like the following that shows a list of functions (x-axis) by the number of times each function is used (y-axis) in a given time window? Per client? Across all clients?
Long-tail of OSS functionality use

Leave us a comment below if you’ve ever seen this type of profiling instrumentation (not for code optimisation, but for identifying client utilisation levels) and/or systematic feature subtraction initiatives.

BTW. I should make the distinction that just because a function hasn’t been used in a while, doesn’t mean it should automatically be removed. Some functionality (eg data loaders) might be rarely used, but important to retain.

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