Not long ago, I came upon a LinkedIn post. It’s in French, but the theme is about sharing risk between the customer and the contractor in software development projects. To sum it up, the author is advocating for the Agile way: fixed-price contracting puts risk on the shoulders of the contractor, while time-and-material gives responsibility to the customer. Some commenters showed surprised that we, software developers, are not able to precisely assess risks by ourselves.

A couple of years ago, I wrote a post focused on how to avoid sequences of if-else statements. In that post, I demo several alternatives: the usage of proper OOP designmapswhen there’s no return, switch statements in a case. Recently, I stumbled upon a slightly more complex use-case. This post describes it, and details what additional options are available in Kotlin.

Disclaimer: this post touches bits and pieces of finance, management and sociology for which I’m far from qualified. However, I’ve plenty of experience working in companies where they had big effects and I couldn’t resist drawing my own conclusions. I’ll happily listen to realistic solutions. I’ve been working for more than a decade in the software industry, always as a consultant.