Comment by shaunofthedev

The perils of UI design wagging the horse.

I like the heuristics described here. However if these things aren't making it into a product spec where appropriate, then I smell some dysfunction that goes beyond what's being stored by default.

Product need (expressed as spec, design, etc) should highlight the failure cases where we would expect fields like these to be surfaced.

I'd hope that any given buisness shouldn't need someone with production database access on hand to inform as to why/when/how 'thing' was deleted. Really we'd want the user (be it 'boss' or someone else) to be able to access that information in a controlled manner.

"What information do we need when something goes wrong?". Ask it. Drill it. Ask it again.

That said, if you can't get those things, this seems a fine way to be pragmatic.