[kelseyfrog]

Sort of, but mostly yes. I inherited a code base and some team members for a video management system (security-VMS). It was a fantastic code base for the feature set it provided. However, the product strategy also changed with this inheritance, and that change in context of requirements made it less than optimal.

In no way am I faulting the original authors. They designed a system for precisely what was requested and it worked beautifully. My point is that "well done" can change meaning based on the environment. There were spots in the architecture/organization that made valid assumptions that turned out to no longer be valid and had to be re-worked to accommodate the changes. They were correct in not laying out that flexibility in the first place, but it still represented an in congruence between the problem domain and the solution.