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Discussion on: The most important skill a programmer can learn

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Nic Hartley

Fair enough! My only concern is that a junior developer will read this and take from it the bad idea of refusing all scope increases. I agree that scope creep is a bad thing in general, but there are times when it makes perfect sense.

For example, let's continue on the example of the email client. Sure, it can send and receive emails, and that's the barebones requirements. But now, every email you get is all in the same list, whether they're racist forwards from your "I'm not racist, but..." uncle or from that big new client you just netted. So clearly, some sort of filtering is useful. Even though that's an increase in scope, it's still worth it to add, because that's a vital feature.

That's what I meant by "that's just not the case" -- sure, you might think you know exactly what you're making, but even the most detailed specs can't account for everything.