Maintain simplicity and clarity of product.
When there are too many features to implement, qualities (non-functions) should suffer to squeeze everything into the resource and schedule constraints.
Related:
‣
‣ Beware of feature bloat. Keep software focused.
https://lethain.com/reclaim-unreasonable-software/ If your software does succeed in addressing the problem domain, then it becomes Golden Age software. Golden Age software is the best of software in the best of circumstances. The team maintaining it is the team who designed it, intimately familiar with all its quirks. The problems it solves are mostly the problems it was designed to solve, within the constraints it was designed to satisfy. At some point, you’ll find an extraordinarily elegant extension to the software, allowing you to solve an important new problem that wasn’t part of the original design. This solution will be heralded as a validation of how flexible the software is, but in retrospect you’ll realize this was the beginning of the Golden Age’s end: the elegant solve that foretold a growing inability to reason about the software. Time fosters complexity and decays software. Teams decay too, with folks moving off to other projects and companies. At some point you’ll look up and realize you’re maintaining Post-Apocalyptic software whose evolution has become “lost technology”, harrowing to operate or extend. You have a book of incantations that tend to allow it to keep turning, but no one is comfortable making meaningful changes.