Examples of issues Ive seen in the wild because people violate this rule include payroll systems with an arbitrary maximum number of pay codes and review app systems with a static number of review apps.
Just like every other heuristic in software engineering, its not a silver bullet, but generally speaking, this principle will serve you well.
So you're confirming what I said. No theoretical basis. You just reaffirmed my position that this rule of thumb is anecdotal with your own anecdotal experiences.
If you look through this very thread there are people talking about anecdotal experiences verifying the opposite effect.
Interestingly this sort of thing falls into a special category where reasoning from first principles is less rigorous than pattern matching to experience. That's because we don't have a good theoretical model.
We're at the point in history where doctor who noticed less patients dying after they wash their hands argues with the doctor with a very erudite explanation of how that's impossible. Maybe someday we'll discover germ theory, but until then we're left to argue anecdotes down in the mud.
You recall mercury? Mercury was used by doctors for years as medicine and it was validated by anecdotal experiences. But it really had the complete opposite effect. It killed people. That is the reliability of anecdotes and an illustration of how delusional humans and "experts" are. Nowadays there's still no complete "theory" for medical science. We have partial theories like biochemistry but it's not a complete theory as in we can't completely derive which chemicals can cure which disease via a formal model.
In fact given the complexity of reality we may never ever have a formal model for medicine and as such we most likely will have to forever rely on asymmetrical nature of science.
Computing is bounded in a simulated universe axioms and logic. Computers are in actuality a part of reality but we try to use them as if they are seperate universes of pure logic and math games. To say that something has "some theoretical basis" is a very precise statement in computing because unlike medicine it is VERY possible for entities in such a bounded system to have a complete formal theory.
The problem is the Zero one infinity rule is not such a thing. The statement to say it has "some theoretical basis" is therefore completely false. Especially given the fact that in this thread there are a bunch of counter examples and I myself don't fully agree with it. How do you know this Zero one infinite rule is not just some form of mercury in disguise?
My disagreement, however, is NOT the point. The point is that this rule currently has ZERO theoretical basis. Additionally given the existence of counter examples, it likely will ALWAYS have zero theoretical basis. I don't completely deny the validity of anecdotal evidence, but, again, the claim made initially by the GP is false.
What theoretical merit? It sounds like a completely made up rule of thumb based off of a persons anecdotal experience.