“Walk slowly then you’ll go far” -Hector Garcia Puigcerver

Source DesignStaminaHypothesis by Martin Fowler

Any software engineer might have heard about the term “technical debt”. That term refers to a common practice in the industry when “people have made a considered decision to adopt a design strategy that isn’t sustainable in the longer term, but yields a short term benefit, such as making a release” — Martin Fowler

In an enterprise software system you might find business logic deeply nested in hundreds of Stored Procedures in Oracle CI. Inside each Stored Proc, the logic might refer to several other Stored Procs. Some of those other Stored Procs refer to another set of Stored Procs.

There are documentation of the business logic, but the team constantly have doubts if it is up to date. The situation ends up that the code become the documentation. Usually the senior analysts are the one that know the logic the most. They are considered as Subject Matter Experts (SMEs). After some years, they move on to other department or move out to another organization.

I encountered such situation in my prior experience working at an insurance company.

In the context of the taxi haling company, there could be separate Stored Proc for different payment mode. Moving up to the table design, you might find that there is a separate table for each of a booking channel in the context of a…