Tog's paradox
Tog’s Paradox (also known as The Complexity Paradox or Tog’s Complexity Paradox) is an observation that products aiming to make a task more efficient tend to inspire new, more complex use cases. It’s one of the key reasons for the symptom of requirements changing after delivery in enterprise software products, and for feature creep in consumer products. Tog’s Paradox also explains why it’s futile to try to completely nail down requirements for a software product, as the product itself will have an impact on the users, causing them to demand new functions.
Bruce Tognazzini formulated the paradox as a loophole in Tesler’s Law, which states that inherent complexity in a user task does not change (but it can be shifted from a user to an application or the other way around). Tognazzini suggested instead that the task complexity does not stay the same, but increases.
The argument follows Tognazzini’s previous observation, called Tog’s Law of Commuting (published in the 1995 book (Tog on Software Design), which suggests that users have a specific amount of time to complete a task, and if they can finish the work sooner, they will take on more work to fill the available time.
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