There was an old woman who swallowed a fly [anti-pattern]
On many occasions I find myself humming this tune: I'm sure there's another name for this anti-pattern, but it's a variation of yak shaving in which each progressive solution to a perceived problem becomes more imperfect and workarounds and unlikely solutions are progressively applied. Ultimately, the question often forgotten is "what was the original problem?" I'll give the technical verision of what happens: Someone discovers that logging in to a web application isn't working for some users it's discovered the service that accepts userid and password is returning an error for what we believe to be a valid userid and password for these users digging further it's discovered that the code to validate userid and password is calling another service to load a user's customer record and this service is returning a new error when researching this customer service, it's discovered a new error started 2 weeks ago that