I am currently debating with my colleagues around how I should develop an API to be used by my department. In particular, I was tasked with writing an API that will serve as a wrapper facade for accessing Active Directory information, taking into account the needs of my company / department. I know that open source wrappers facades already exist, but this is not the essence of this issue and is simply used as an example.
When I presented my design proposal to my team, they shot me because the API was not "custom". They claimed that they did not want the API to communicate between the "Phone Number" and the "Obscure Active Directory Submission View of the Phone Number." Everyone at the meeting (except me) agreed that they would rather ask, "What Active Directory field is used for the user's phone number?" And connect it to the appropriate applications (LOL!).
They asked me: "What if our company decides to use a different field for a phone number, and you were not there to make changes to your source code?" In the end, they admitted that they were afraid to be instructed to change the code of another, even if the code was intact and had extensive unit tests. Every senior IT professional in my department agreed.
Is this really the right attitude to software development ?!
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