> A one-off won't help much at all.
Monumentally disagree. One-off session with a guy who knows the codebase inside out can save you days of research work. Plus telling you all about the problematic/historical areas.
Monumentally disagree. One-off session with a guy who knows the codebase inside out can save you days of research work. Plus telling you all about the problematic/historical areas.
But the devil is in all the tiny details. What is this tiny correction factor that was added 20 years ago? Why was this value cut off to X decimals? Why didn't they just do Y here? Why do we override this default behavior?
It's tens of thousands of tiny questions like that which you can't ask until you're there.
It's not a bad thing, and it's certainly good to do, but it's not a solution to the problem.
Effectively everything becomes a "drop in the bucket".
Like ... it doesn't help that much. Mainly it saves some frustration of the build system is insane or the source code is spread out in mails, a hd and a floppy in a drawer or the current source state is broken and need to be reverted.
But if the original author is there to do a handover, the chances are the company is properly run and the work will be a breeze anyway becouse the code is good and well structured.