so in the early hours of the 6th april I wonder how many other people were busily runnig update scripts on their company databases  to ensure the next tax year figures came into effect and no doubt how much searching of emails and file shares occurred to try and work out what you did the year previously or the person that carried out the task has left and the first you know about it is either a calendar entry pops up to remind you or sometimes its too late and the data coming out the system if found to be in error.

why does this situation occur? too often project budgets do not allow for maintenance screens and routines to be built or the project has overrun and cost cutting forces these tasks to be removed and be deemed a bau support process. quite often design decisions fail to recognise that certain key information may change on a set date , even worse are the cases where by  values are hardcoded into an application meaning the application has to be modified and redeployed.

examples i have seen of hard coding have been VAT rates who would think the UK rate would change from 17.5% to 20%, obviously the millenium example of upper date checking against 31/12/1999 and where a structured numeric identifier is used to identify a category or type i.e. 200000 to 299999 is crime novels; 300000 to 399999 is graphic novels unfortuantely what happens when the numbers are exhausted.

you would hope that this would not occur in todays system solutions but i have seen that this not to be the case. cutting corners and lack of forward planning are still very evident in enterprise solutions