Bullet-point engineering is a software design

Software design

Software design is a process of problem solving and planning for a software solution. After the purpose and specifications of software are determined, software developers will design or employ designers to develop a plan for a solution...

 anti-pattern

Anti-pattern

In software engineering, an anti-pattern is a pattern that may be commonly used but is ineffective and/or counterproductive in practice.The term was coined in 1995 by Andrew Koenig,...

 where developers use the features of competing software packages as checklists of features to implement in their own product. These features are often implemented poorly and haphazardly, without any real design, merely so they can be added to a bulleted

Bullet (typography)

In typography, a bullet is a typographical symbol or glyph used to introduce items in a list. For example:*Item 1*Item 2*Item 3...

 list of features in marketing material. Bullet point engineering often leads to feature creep and software bloat

Software bloat

Software bloat is a process whereby successive versions of a computer program include an increasing proportion of unnecessary features that are not used by end users, or generally use more system resources than necessary, while offering little or no benefit to its users.-Causes:Software developers...

but may also simply result in a poorly designed imitative product.