These issues can be improved by rising above the bad or non-existent communication practices seen in software engineering, which are partly a technical issue an

These issues can be improved by rising above the bad or non-existent communication practices seen in software engineering, which are partly a technical issue and part a cultural one. If you want to be helpful to your users, rather than punish them for doing something you didn't explicitly allow them to do, you can communicate. Issue warning messages to people using a behavior that will be deprecated. Keep the old version around for a while for compatibility, but require users to opt into it and tell them when it's going away. Email your users to announce breaking changes. Et cetera. All of this can take significant effort, and of course some people won't listen, won't check logs, will ignore warning messages and sunset dates. Which is the other side of the problem. Whether we're changing software or adapting to changes, the message remains the same: software engineering isn't just futzing around with code until something "works", and then anything that breaks after that is someone else's problem. We live in a society where we all depend on each other. We need to communicate, and communicate in a way that values each other's success.