Project Retrospectives · Published May 10, 2026
Retrospective: A Month Lost to Missing Documentation
The core developer left and the successor spent a month before daring to change a line.
The system had run stable for two years when the core developer resigned. Handover lasted two weeks, and the successor spent the first month reading code and guessing intent. A small client request took ten days to reach production.
What was missing
Why things were built that way. Several odd behaviours existed for a specific client requirement years earlier.
Which data must not be touched. Some tables are written by external systems, and manual edits break synchronisation.
The deployment procedure lived in one head: which servers, which scheduled jobs, which environment variables.
Our handover checklist now
Each core member maintains a system note with architecture diagrams, key decisions and common incident playbooks.
Deployment and rollback are scripts, so anyone can follow the document and release.
Handover starts at least a month before departure, and the successor performs one release alone.
People move on. Whether a system keeps running after anyone leaves is the real measure of team maturity.
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