It's not a configuration issue. It’s a design issue

Consider this piece of code

url = applicationConfig.publicationUrl + relativeResourcePath

it contains a source of error, namely data.relativeResourcePath is of the form files/document.pdf and publicationUrl is 

of the form http://someserver/. So when someone changes the the applicationConfig to say http://otherServer:81 the download is not going to work anymore as we dropped the trailing slash. So url would be http://otherServer:81files/document.pdf which obviously won’t work

Ok so this is a configuration issue. What a pity, can’t do much about that. Even if we do TDD, testing configuration effectively isn’t easy. 

But wait! This code suffers from a Code Smell called Primitive Obsession. A better design would be the following:

url = applicationConfig.publicationUrlFor(relativeResourcePath)

Poka Yoke

Now it’s easy to add the extra slash in case it is missing within the publicationUrlFor method and this type of configuration issue is gone forever throughout the application. Besides publicationUrlFor() is testable.

This is a simple example to highlight the idea that we can design away many of the bugs that we live with in our projects. By designing away sources of errors we make our code more usable, it can only be used in the right way. In Lean this is called Poka-Yoke. Every situation needs a different design to eliminate the possibility of misuse, but the general idea is the same - Design away sources of bugs.

For inspiration have a look at this other example of how to design away bugs due to temporal coupling: section Eliminate Exceptions in this post.