Article on Technology (development)

You own a shop with an electronic inventory system. Your cereal aisle is empty, so you order 5 boxes of Corn Flakes and 5 Boxes of Rice Crispies to stock it up. Your inventory looks like this:

Corn Flakes: 5
Rice Crispies: 5

A customer comes along, picks a box of each cereal off the shelf and heads for the self-checkout. Instead of scanning each box individually, they scan the Corn Flakes box twice, pay and walk out. The transaction details are sent to your inventory system, which now looks like this:

Corn Flakes: 3
Rice Crispies: 5

But in reality you have 4 of each. As a result, you might order more boxes of Corn Flakes than you actually need, and not enough boxes of Rice Crispies.