One of the main reasons why it’s difficult to troubleshoot problems in complex environments is lack of documentation. This post is long overdue because it was inspired a while ago by Dan Fink’s post (again). Be sure to read it first.

From time to time, I see situations when one person leaving the company leads to a disaster that puts in danger the whole existence of multimillion businesses. Why? Because there is nobody else who knows how system works and how all its moving parts are connected. How does that happen? No knowledge sharing.

The most universal method of knowledge transfer is documenting stuff and I would argue that, most of the times, one hour of documenting brings to a business more than two hours developing new functionality in PL/SQL.

Actually, there might not even exist such know-it-all-wizard. Complex systems are not created in a matter of days or even months. Often, extreme complexity is the result of years or even decades of evolution. All those workarounds, bug fixes, re-designs, pressing deadlines — those friends of entropy win time from documentation tasks.
Continue reading ‘Avoiding Guesswork in Complex Environments’