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Daniel Hoelbling-Inzko talks about programming

Beware of smart customers

Posted by Daniel Hölbling on February 5, 2009

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I shipped a accounting application in January and got asked to implement some new features into the software lately.
That customer I worked for on that project was absolutely amazing, we really found a common ground to communicate about the needs of the business and my implementation of it. I tried to apply domain driven design as much as possible, and it really worked out exceptionally well.
The customer now has a basic knowledge of what I’m doing and how I’m doing that, while I understand most of his business needs and how to translate those to code.

The dark side of this is that the customer now started to use the system in ways I never intended it to because he knew how to achieve his desired output.

For example, the system has no built-in support for selling set-products. Meaning that buying 1 meta product actually is selling 5 different products for a different set-price.

We once briefly talked about that feature, but neglected it to get more important stuff done, and it never came up since then.

Turns out, the customer implemented that feature himself, by creating a product representing the set, and whenever selling it, he added the set and the 5 sub products to the order. Changing the price of the 5 sub products to zero caused the bill to appear right while still removing the items from storage.

This bit me yesterday when I was asked to implement another feature did some calculations that aren’t based on the actual sell price of the products but on their base price. This screws my complete calculation because now that data is indistinguishable from another kind of data in the system that has to be treated differently.
So I end up with a new type of sale that the system has no means of identifying (without doing some rather complicated and error prone rule matching stuff I want to avoid).

Now, a rather trivial feature has turned into a major system refactor since I need to re-implement the set functionality and some creative ways how to fix the old sales to reflect that change.

Time I would have rather spent working on other things, instead of running with scissors :).

Watch out for how you communicate with your customers and make sure they tell you anything about the system and their intended uses. If you give them enough power through the UI, they will start to fill in bogus values to achieve their business needs without you knowing.

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