That pesky hard-coding
The other day I was reviewing a request for a quote and a statement of work for a project I've been working on for a while and my eye caught an interesting statement I haven't noticed before: ...the proposed approach of refactoring the codebase and procuring COTS products for replacement of hard-coded functionality is the lowest risk and most cost-effective approach to delivering an improved solution... Hard-coded functionality? Huh? What's that? Well, technically, all functionality implemented by means of software code is hard-coded in a sense or in other words, doesn't change unless you change the code logic. That's actually perfectly normal and good thing. You wouldn't want your software to go all fuzzy and produce different results each time given the same inputs. So clearly, whoever wrote the request for a quote didn't understand what hard-coded means. The term hard-coded is used in a slightly different context and is considered a negative pract