Silent spec bug: retired requirements kept inflating test coverage denominators
A developer maintaining an append-only specification file discovered that two tools parsing requirements had no concept of 'retired' rows, causing every corrected requirement to add a phantom entry to the total count. Because retiring a row only changed a text prefix rather than the structural shape of the heading, both readers continued treating old and new rows as live requirements, quietly lowering test coverage with each correction. The root cause was a writing convention — retirement — that existed only in human habit and had never been encoded as machine-readable data. The fix was not to patch each reader individually, but to define a shared configuration table listing which heading forms are live and which are retired, so all current and future tools derive their behavior from one authoritative source. The author concludes that any rule added to make an earlier rule survivable must be explicitly communicated to every system that consumes the original rule, or it will be silently ignored.
