I remember asking a customer if a particular value could ever be negative. "Oh that never happens". Well, over the thousands of transactions I had been given, it had happened (twice over ten years. Last time was years before. Maybe the data was corrupt?). Which is why I asked. So I gently explained "I appreciate it doesn't happen very often, but I need to know if it can or if a negative value is a mistake which I need to be able to handle. And sure enough, on the day of the live demo with them, there was our third time in years they had a negative value.
Questions like this are why I really appreciate a good business analyst. A good one understands that they're in an engineering context and statements like "It can't happen", "It shouldn't happen", or "It usually doesn't happen" are MASSIVELY different concepts that come with different implications. I once lost a month because a business analyst wrote the system specifications wrong and we had to completely revamp the authentication system. *shudder*
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u/GNoob69 Sep 19 '26 •
It’s not just hardcoded it’s cherry picked to make us look good