· 9 min read
The Old System Knows Things Nobody Wrote Down
In long-lived business platforms a large share of policy sits in stored procedures, triggers, constraints, defaults and view definitions rather than in application code. A developer reading the application sees a call and a result, and the policy inside is invisible. Enumerating it from the system catalogue produces an artefact the organisation has never had, and the gap between that artefact and the specification is the real finding.