The Onion has a cute story about a beaver over thinking and overengineering a dam to the point that he never builds it. It got me thinking about all the projects that I've worked on that spent months in "design committees" and "getting user feedback" that kept me from just building the actual product...
The purpose of a dam is to hold water back. The purpose of an Ethernet router is to route traffic.
The committee'd to death project I remember the most was for a redesign of an existing FDDI product that we spent so much time debating the number and type of interface ports (RJ-45, USB, DB-9 etc.) that when we finally got ready to do board layout it was decided there was not a large enough market to produce the new product.
Anyone else have a "death by committee" story?
Warning Against Overengineering
Fear of Failure
