>Fascinating perspective, Dragan. So the rules encoded into the software drove the business process rather than the reverse? Wow. Your experiences in this regard would be a great article or book.

We didn't invent the business logic. We applied what other customers demanded. In many cases, we knew how others did things, and often knew more than a particular customer's staff.

In some cases... well, yes, had to invent a few things. The funniest one was the "egg sorting warehouse". We had a poultry farm which would deliver eggs, and then these eggs had to be categorized into Class A, Class B... slightly knocked, leaked and crashed. The solution I suggested (but made it look like it was their boss's idea) was to invent a virtual warehouse, which would receive the uncategorized eggs, and deliver the six or seven categories out. It would permanently have a positive amount of the former and a negative amount of the latter, and the whole process would be localized and easy to track within this 'warehouse'. There was no warehouse, however - it was just a foreign key into a lookup table.

Or the case in Hungary, when I had to invent a "parked" patient. It meant "finished with this guy for a while, will resume when his x-ray is developed". The doctors thought the wording is preposterous and totally out of line with the language... and a week later they were all using it.

Um... I figure I could have enough stuff for an article, or a book. Too much history. They'll probably hang me in a museum in the end, next to the fire extinguisher :).