It could be for a phone pabx. One could imagine a situation where a product was carefully designed and worked well. Along comes marketing and tells engineering that we need more phone lines - pronto. So the orginal design gets stretched and it still works. Ripper beauty! More phone lines....... The then engineer Scotty says 'We cannet do it Captain, we'll vibrate to pieces'.

The original concept for using a task for each phone line may have been sheer genius for a small system but a bad choice for a larger system.

All this may be pure speculation, but many of us have had to deal with or seen such a situation.

In 'extreme programming' they preach a technique called 'refactorisation' - redesign it. Otherwise, you'll need to get more shield power from the dilithium crystals.....