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I was brought into to help at an early stage startup a few years ago. The company was building an e-commerce platform and the product owner had this idea of 'attributes' that could be attached to any kind of entity in the system (e.g. product, category, order, customer). If they needed a new attribute they would be able to simply set it up through the admin UI without any developer intervention (because developers are expensive!). When I joined the attribute system had been build with a beautiful UI, and the backend was mostly working for managing attributes, but that was pretty much it. The first feature I was working on was showing products on the store, and for this the idea of attributes made sense. If you are selling a product in the "OLED TV" category you probably want a "Screen Size" attribute, and to be able to use it to compare against different products in that category. Through the platform we had maybe 500 product level attributes, with more being added all the time, so having them hard-coded wouldn't have been manageable. That was pretty much as well as it worked though. Sellers needed to be able to manage their stock through the system, so on the warehouse entity there were attributes describing the number of products in stock, lead time, how often they restock, etc. The attributes didn't really have validations, but they had types which described what UI element should be displayed when they are entered. However all of the validations around that were at the whim of the front-end, and in some cases it would send what you would think should be a numerical type as a string (and then if you try to change it something would break as that expected it to be a string), so doing any kind of calculations or logic on the attributes was basically impossible. In the end I just added db-level fields to the stock entities, with validations in the backend to make sure these were as expected. The backend was a Rails app, so this took 10 minutes vs days trying to coerce the attribute system into doing what I needed. As it was a Rails app we couldn't actually name the model of these Attribute, so had to give it another name, and whenever someone new joined (it was an early stage startup, so had high turnover) we had a 30 minute discussion explaining this. I never got the explanation of how the product owner expected logic to be attached to these attributes without a developer doing any work, but I'm sure they had an 'ingenious plan' for that too. Needless to say, the startup burned through all it's funding without even launching, then managed to convince the investors to give them a little bit more, launched a half working product, and it turned out nobody wanted it. |