What Is Duck?

In IT, there's a saying: "Keep your friends close and your clients even closer." What if you could keep clients so close that they wouldn't notice anything else? What if you could distract them from seeing any other changes to your projects? What if. What if you could make them think they see all the changes they need when seeing a duck? That's right – a "duck" feature is unnecessary in a project to draw attention away from any other changes that clients, producers or third parties might request. It is said that a duck's quack is loud but also shallow, making it hard to hear anything else happening around it. It is how the word is used in the IT industry. It's a way for coders to communicate with each other about ever-changing client requests and how they want to try to implement the changes without making them too obvious. One way to describe a "duck" feature is that it's something that's just a little bit different from what the client requested but not enough to change the scope of the project. For example, a client asks for a red button to be placed on a website, but the programmer writes the code with a green button, which is a duck feature. There are a lot of urban legends surrounding the origin of the "duck" feature, but the one we have heard most often is that it came from a story about the development of a Battle Chess game some decades ago. Also, a duck feature is something—usually an animation or sound effect—that programmers insert into a project deemed unnecessary by those evaluating it. They leave it there to eliminate it without repeating the whole process. Then they call it "the duck."