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Rivva’s Anti Clutter Sprint

Probably most of us are better at getting stuff than at getting rid of stuff. We put significant amounts of money and time into our collections and since we still are squirrels in our cerebellums we stick to them even if we would be way better off without this clutter.

The same goes for software companies of course. Feature Creep – the tendency to add just another little feature until the whole product is overwhelmed with them – is everywhere.

Rivva’s founder Frank Westphal did something curageous today. He saw that most features he has added to Rivva since it launched in March did not add real value to Rivva’s high level vision, so he decided to purge them all and roll Rivva back to its original version.

- More time to improve those features where Rivva already is good at (Kaizen)

- Each line of code removed means less weight to carry around (Travel light)

- Rivva’s focus will increase (Simplicity)

- No more competition for even more features. New features only will be added as another feature will be removed (Ying & Yang)

Rivva is a memetracker for the German blogosphere so he didn’t have to worry about users contributions. And once a feature is added the costs are sunk anyway, of course, but anyone who has written a line of code knows the emotional ties that can get associated with them. Kudos for this radical gesture and for a case study that this can be done.

See our previous coverage of Rivva here.

Company blog: Blog

(This article originally was written for blognation Germany. Since blognation is gone I have reposted it here)

☍ 08.10.2007 # rivva clutter kaizen