The Tragic Lifecycle of a 'Planned Feature'
Description
This image is a screenshot of an answer from a Q&A website, resembling Stack Overflow, which has been upvoted 49 times and marked as the accepted solution with a green checkmark. The answer, from the author of a software module, addresses a feature request. Initially, the author states, 'I'm the author of that module and unfortunately that isn't possible. It is a planned feature, and (a small) part of the internal infrastructure is there to support it, but it isn't currently available and I can't say when it will be.' This is followed by a stark, bolded update: 'Update: this feature was never implemented and is no longer planned.' The humor captures the harsh reality of software development, where well-intentioned plans and roadmaps often collide with practical constraints like time, budget, or shifting priorities. For experienced developers, this is a painfully familiar scenario, representing the graveyard of features that were once promised but ultimately abandoned, leaving behind vestigial code and unfulfilled user expectations
Comments
16Comment deleted
Every codebase has a ghost haunting it - the partially implemented infrastructure for a 'planned feature' that's now just technical debt
A “planned feature” is just Schrödinger’s backlog item - simultaneously shipping and cancelled until you open JIRA
The rare Stack Overflow answer where the author shows up to personally deliver the bad news, like a doctor explaining why your architecture has six months to live
The full lifecycle of a feature request, immortalized: 'planned' → 'infrastructure partially exists' → 'never implemented and no longer planned'. The only roadmap with 100% honest status reporting
Ah yes, the classic 'planned feature' - the software equivalent of 'we should grab coffee sometime.' It's got 49 upvotes, infrastructure partially built, and a roadmap entry that aged like milk. The author's update is the technical debt equivalent of finding your ex's wedding announcement: 'this feature was never implemented and is no longer planned.' At least they had the decency to come back and update it, which puts them ahead of 90% of abandoned GitHub issues. This is why senior engineers read 'planned feature' as 'maybe in 2-3 years if we don't pivot, get acquired, or decide to rewrite everything in Rust first.'
OSS roadmaps: 'Planned with infra' today, 'RIP ticket' tomorrow - faster iteration than any CI pipeline
When the accepted answer is basically your Jira workflow - Proposed → stubbed infra → indefinite ETA → Won’t Fix - you’ve reached peak roadmap realism
Schrödinger’s roadmap: we stubbed the interfaces, scheduled “later,” and after a reorg it collapsed into WONTFIX
What was the question? Comment deleted
https://stackoverflow.com/questions/22352907/apply-format-to-a-cell-after-being-written-in-xlsxwriter Comment deleted
He should mention pull request is welcome Comment deleted
*isn’t Comment deleted
Um….why not just turn off pull request then? Comment deleted
to humiliate those who will try, of course Comment deleted
what a fucking joke Comment deleted
Unity Engine moment Comment deleted