Similarly a colleague just told me yesterday about a data vendor who is sending data over on a almost nightly basis. They changed the process/format - without

Similarly a colleague just told me yesterday about a data vendor who is sending data over on a almost nightly basis. They changed the process/format - without notifying anyone - and things broke. End users of my colleague's application were now saying they were seeing inactive client data coming up in their app, and it was causing confusion. During the time trying to figure out the new behavior, the main client finally got something in writing about "here's how it works" from the data vendor... * Rule 1... * Rule 2... * Rule 3: If a client record has not had any data updated, we will only send over the client name and header info, but no additional data records will be sent over. * Rule 4.... * Rule 5: If a client record is no longer active in the system (for example, has been deleted), we will only send over the client name and header info, but no additional data records will be sent over. Questioning back to the original data provider - if we get a client name and header info, but no additional data records - what does that mean? Does it mean the client is inactive/deleted, or simply that they've had no data change since yesterday? Absolutely no coherent response, and I doubt there will be one. The defense of "no no, we have to keep stupid behaviour around because people rely on it!" doesn't even stand - this change came about in the last couple weeks, after having worked this way for more than a year. It's both maddening and frightening how fragile so much daily data exchange is.