Not documenting your software internals?
How serious is the risk? Why Was Dani Worried?
A company providing 24/7 services to businesses in the United States contacted JBS about a year ago. A new VP Engineering had joined the company (let's call him Dani). Dani was worried. He found a team of top developers who each knew their own bit of the system in depth. But two of the company's technical leads had left the company and taken a great deal of technical knowledge with them...in their heads.
- What was the underlying rationale for how the system was designed?
- There must be a good reason that there are different software modules that perform the same functions, but what is it? Which should be used, when?
- Do we really need to maintain a full terabyte of data on the SQL server or can much of it be removed?
How Did it Affect the Business?
Without answers to questions like these Dani could not perform many of his key tasks like:
- Analyze the system's limitations and scale-up to support new business
- Perform analysis of the impact of new features
- Optimize the hardware architecture
- Migrate to newer platforms better suited to the business's needs
How Did JBS help?
With two full-time staff members working on-site for one year JBS provided over 2000 pages of technical documents including:
- For each software module: Functional and Architectural Specifications and Developer's and DBA's Reference Manuals
- Operational Reference Manuals
- System Architecture Specifications (for various parallel versions)
- A full database specification including Data Dictionary and Logical Data Model
Of course this kind of project requires more than just technical writing. JBS staff members brought with them expertise in Systems Analysis, programming and outstanding research abilities.
The company is now able to hire new developers and engineers who can learn about the system from the documents provided by JBS, scale up and grow the system in a knowledgeable way, and overall, move forward with the confidence of knowing that its valuable technical knowledge is captured in writing.
Contact JBS to schedule a meeting to discuss your internal documentation