Reality Vs. Customer Satisfaction

In enterprise IT world, there's always a debate between what's the right way to do things and what the clients want. What might please our clients might not always be the best solution. As I've been wadding towards my third year milestone of job experience, I've encountered so many situations where what our clients specified a requirement, we implemented it and later on they wanted to change it again. I used to think that as a service provider, I should always provide customers what they want. But sometimes, a firm objection (as long as you have a solid reason) is needed to avoid regular updating and changing of the code.

I'm writing this post in relating to an event that happened a few days ago, which is related to what I was talking above. In my project, we need to capture our client's information such as name, dob and etc. We also need to capture the marital status of each of our client. The old implementation was such that any clients under 16 will not be asked of their marital status. This specification has been requested by our analyst who left. For me, I don't think 16 is not a realist number for this situation. There're a couple instances where 14, 15 years old can be a parent. But he was the analyst and I thought he would have known better.

Now after one year since when the system has gone live, they started complaining about the age restraint. They started questioning why we chose 16 to be the limit. Honestly, I had no idea. So, after a few brainstorming, 13 was chosen to be the decision point. And we told our client that this will be the final decision and no further changes should be made about it. For me, I really didn't think 13 was the right solution. There is always something else.

So guess what? The other day they found out there's a 12 year old parent. It's a sick world. But it's the reality. My coworker did some search on Google about the youngest parent in history and 5 was the youngest one. (If you want detailed information , you can view here. ) Now the question is do we put 5 as the decision point instead of 13. Or do we take out the age restraint at all? Anyone under 5 could never be a parent. But you will never know in this bizarre and strange world. When it came down to user satisfaction, how far can we go?