Once upon a time a vendor arrived at a software project.

“My product fulfills all your business needs,” he announced. “Just let me sit down and install it, then you’ll see.”

The managers and developers were behind schedule and intrigued, so they agreed. As good as his word the vendor sat down and began to install his product.

“This is going very well,” the vendor announced. “But I just need some help configuring the product for your local system.” A developer rushed in and after a few days work provided the necessary configuration.

“Ah, superb!” said the vendor. “Now this is almost right, but it would be much better if someone could write a custom handler for your propriety input files.” A developer rushed in and after a few days provided the necessary file handlers.

“Now things are just right,” the vendor said. “Oh, but for perfection I expect you’d like to add some custom plugins for your business rules.” A developer rushed in and after a few days provided the business rule plugins. Things continued this way, through custom user screens, auditors, message queue adaptors, authentication, authorisation, and many other customisations.

Eventually the vendor declared the product ready. Everyone was delighted, not least the vendor: as well as enjoying a tasty implementations fee eventually, after much negotiations to sell a company-wide license.

In case you haven’t heard the Stone Soup story it is an old folktale. Typically a traveller arrives in a miserly village and announces that he is making soup for everybody from a stone; he tricks the villagers into seasoning his soup with various ingredients which make a rich and tasty soup. See here, here, and here.