CodeSOD: How About Next Month

Dave's codebase used to have this function in it:

public DateTime GetBeginDate(DateTime dateTime){ return new DateTime(dateTime.Year, dateTime.Month, 01).AddMonths(1);}

I have some objections to the naming here, which could be clearer, but this code is fine, and implements their business rule.

When a customer subscribes, their actual subscription date starts on the first of the following month, for billing purposes. Note that it's passed in a date time, because subscriptions can be set to start in the future, or the past, with the billing date always tied to the first of the following month.

One day, all of this worked fine. After a deployment, subscriptions started to ignore all of that, and always started on the date that someone entered the subscription info.

One of the commits in the release described the change:

Adjusted the begin dates for the subscriptions to the start of the current month instead of the start of the following month so that people who order SVC will have access to the SVC website when the batch closes.

This sounds like a very reasonable business process change. Let's see how they implemented it:

public DateTime GetBeginDate(DateTime dateTime){ return DateTime.Now;}

That is not what the commit claims happens. This just ignores the submitted date and just sets every subscription to start at this very moment. And it doesn't tie to the start of a month, which not only is different from what the commit says, but also throws off their billing system and a bunch of notification modules which all assume subscriptions start on the first day of a month.

The correct change would have been to simply remove the AddMonths call. If you're new here, you might wonder how such an obvious blunder got past testing and code review, and the answer is easy: they didn't do any of those things.

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