Your local library should have a copy of this book [1]. It is fantastic (though I came really close to setting it down in disgust within the first two chapters).
I completely agree with you that this is maddening and increasingly common in all walks of life. The situation is not getting better either.
Having worked for companies that do this kind of contract work I can imagine how this could occur:
The state puts out an RFP (Request for Proposal) written by someone completely removed from the technical aspects and actual work to be done.
After a bunch of BS, some company gets awarded the contract and begin work. They quickly find that what was requested in the RFP doesn't make sense and they have to either drift from the exact requirements of the contract, or deliver something completely broken.
Not wanting to lose the customer, or violate the contract they decide to forge ahead, working with the state to form the requirements into some form of sanity. Some stories get added to a sprint by someone who doesn't know what any of it means and they sit...
They sit, maybe even for multiple sprints (because everyone has given up on the burndown chart being even remotely accurate anyway and no one has time for retrospectives) until someone screams loud enough about it.
Then, poor programmer, likely knee deep in several other tasks, gets asked to work on this story, it needs to be done by end of the week and it's Thursday.
They begin implementing the feature, look for requirements about address length and find none.
They have two choices:
A) Stop work, ask the business analyst or whoever might know, they'll ask their counterpart on the state side, who will then make a request to IT, who will be just as swamped and take four days to give them the answer because Monday is a holiday.
B) Set some default that seems reasonable (50?) and move on.
It's easy to see which one they end up choosing here. Besides, there's likely several things to be done, this one field is a tiny part of it.
Because there's no test system for the back-end (maybe it's written by the state or some other state contractor) they mock it in a database and move on.
But lets say they get done, everything moves along nicely, stuff gets deployed. Then, not long after it's been pushed to prod they get a bug report.
The bug report says that addresses are being truncated in their IBM AS/400 (or equally antiquated mainframe.) there is a limit of 31 characters that needs to be enforced.
Lots of screaming from people with project, manager, and business in their titles.
The programmer, now gets assigned a new story for fixing the bug, because they were the only one that worked on it, they can't escape their fate.
It's Thursday again and the only window they have for the update is this Saturday, they have 2 other projects that are due this week...
They put in the validation for 30 chars and push it out to be deployed.
Then the author hits the aforementioned bug. It will likely never be fixed as the poor soul that worked the feature has now moved on to be a sheep farmer in the mountains.
Itβs an inside look at IT within government.
[1] https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250266774/recodingamerica