🎯 A single source of truth

An intense discussion about part/version numbers driving application logic surfaced an idea to create a simplified version of the product metadata that simplified the programming logic. However, this rarely works out long-term, because several things happen:

1. The two sets of data must be related and kept in sync.
2. This approach ends up replicating the first set of data with the second.

Fix the problems with the first set of data, rather than trying to band-aid it with additional data. Data can be derived by machine, but it should never be created in parallel. There needs to be a single source of truth. Otherwise mistakes will happen. More mistakes than just dealing with the first set of data, no matter how painful.

Manually duplicating data is symptomatic of organizational, not technical problems. Duplicated data often indicates that organizational silos exist caused by a lack of:

• transparency
• collaboration
• cross functional teams
• common standards
• common workflows
• common tools

Don't make excuses for these, fix them.