Programming

It still doesn’t make sense. Obviously your whole explanation hinges very heavily on what exactly you mean when you say “not used/handled” . Depending on your specific use case this could mean anything. As with any code related question, there’s only so much that people who haven’t seen your code can do to help. I think the easiest way to avoid this confusion is to just show some code so we are all on the same page about what the issue is.

On thinking about this a bit more, I feel like you may be expecting the system to handle situations where your business requirement needs the new field to be used now, but used to work without this field before. Based on the example you provided, I am imagining something like a getTasksForUser functionality which previously might have just been filtering on userId but if the business now says that this functionality should now return tasks sorted by priority, you expect the system to somehow know the business requirement and force the developer to use this new priority field ?

If that’s what you’re hoping for, the problem is harder to solve although not impossible. Assuming the example as above , you could maybe just inject the priority field at the data access layer . Another way would be to make the modified entity private and expose a facade with helper functions that are exposed. Now when code that previously used to rely on the entity inevitably breaks , you can replace those usages with usage specific functions exposed from the facade and since the entity is now accessible only from the facade, you can easily update all usages within the facade and make sure no one can miss passing the priority field since the entity is private to the facade and all functions in the facade are known to use the new field.