You scoped the system around the job you do twice a year

Requirements lists are written by memory, and memory is biased toward the painful exception: which is how the rare case ends up shaping software the common case has to live inside.

By Steve 5 min read
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Ask a team what a new system needs to do and something predictable happens. The answers arrive as stories, and the stories are about the difficult ones: the client who insisted on being invoiced in two currencies, the job that had to be re-sequenced after a part arrived damaged, the one contract with a bespoke approval chain. Each story is true. Each is cheap to say and expensive to build. And almost nobody in the room speaks up for the eighty percent of work that goes through unremarkably, because there…

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Important: General information only. Rialto Bridge articles describe patterns and considerations that may apply to a business; they are not financial, legal, tax or accounting advice, and they take no account of your particular circumstances. Consider your own situation and seek advice from a qualified professional before acting.

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