I think you nailed it. Software today is expected to handle all cases and there is not supposed to be any built in manual work arounds. Eliminating the need for manual work arounds takes 80% of the work.
Simple example, company I work for sells both physical and digital products. They used to have separate systems to handle each case and everything worked great. We are now building a new system to handle both at the same time. Issue is that due to US tax codes, there is a different tax rate used for a physically shipped product VS a digitally delivered one. The system has to account for this and no one ever considered this in the design or planning because they never had to deal with this concept before because each system just had to deal with one tax rate per order before.
If in the rare case a customer purchases both types of products in a single order, both tax rates have to be accounted for. Simple work around to save a bunch of work is just have the system limited to only digital or physical per order. This is not a optimal solution so complexity increases by a good deal, especially when refunds, reporting etc. is factored in.
This is not necessarily a bad thing but it is the reason we have such large code bases now, because we need to handle these edge cases without manual human intervention.
Our systems have to be both a jack and master of all trades.
Simple example, company I work for sells both physical and digital products. They used to have separate systems to handle each case and everything worked great. We are now building a new system to handle both at the same time. Issue is that due to US tax codes, there is a different tax rate used for a physically shipped product VS a digitally delivered one. The system has to account for this and no one ever considered this in the design or planning because they never had to deal with this concept before because each system just had to deal with one tax rate per order before.
If in the rare case a customer purchases both types of products in a single order, both tax rates have to be accounted for. Simple work around to save a bunch of work is just have the system limited to only digital or physical per order. This is not a optimal solution so complexity increases by a good deal, especially when refunds, reporting etc. is factored in.
This is not necessarily a bad thing but it is the reason we have such large code bases now, because we need to handle these edge cases without manual human intervention.
Our systems have to be both a jack and master of all trades.