Jeff Atwood over at Coding Horror has an interesting post about Rube Goldberg Software Devices. Check out the video too, sounds like a lot of design sessions I have been sit in on before, although it was usually streamlined out before they were done.
Steve, a co-worker of mine, will often refer to overly complex systems as the Rube Goldberg approach. When I first started working with him we went to see how a system worked that had been put together by someone outside of IT and who was retiring. It involved about 10 steps that the operator was required to run, and relied on no longer supported, proprietary scripting systems. Since the system worked no one was going to mess with it, but if the process ever changes then I imagine it will be rewritten from the ground up.
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