One problem with high turnover is that the people who have developed an understanding for how the systems should work, and which documents are definitive, are long gone and if you're lucky you know the people who knew them.
A big part of the problem with the situation I'm discussing here is that the people who were using the tool were using it incorrectly. The people using the tool (which made offers available to specific customers in certain conditions) did not understand the nuances of the different price values on offers and how they connected with royalties.
I forget the specifics, but imagine someone working with publishers to setup special offers and entering prices into our tool and they just populate two of the three different "Price" fields with the same price because they don't know the difference between "list price" and "my price" and they put the right value in "discount price" (or whatever the terms were). Totally unknown to the person entering the offer, royalties are (incorrectly) calculated based on one of those columns that they have now put a technically incorrect value into. Even if there was a perfectly clear spec, and there wasn't, and it had been implemented perfectly, the tool still would've failed because the people using it didn't really understand the system either.
A big part of the problem with the situation I'm discussing here is that the people who were using the tool were using it incorrectly. The people using the tool (which made offers available to specific customers in certain conditions) did not understand the nuances of the different price values on offers and how they connected with royalties.
I forget the specifics, but imagine someone working with publishers to setup special offers and entering prices into our tool and they just populate two of the three different "Price" fields with the same price because they don't know the difference between "list price" and "my price" and they put the right value in "discount price" (or whatever the terms were). Totally unknown to the person entering the offer, royalties are (incorrectly) calculated based on one of those columns that they have now put a technically incorrect value into. Even if there was a perfectly clear spec, and there wasn't, and it had been implemented perfectly, the tool still would've failed because the people using it didn't really understand the system either.