It always annoys me a bit when someone pops up with a question about some code I worked on five years ago and thinks I should remember the complete details of some method or function that I wrote.  Hell, I can barely remember what I did yesterday at times.

Of course I also make a convenient “authority” to cite when someone wants something that may not have been intended, since I’m no longer on that project.  The current project manager sent me a portion of an IM session with someone who claims I told them a particular thing would work (or that they told me that a certain thing was a requirement).  I suppose they didn’t realize that the current team would ask me about it.  Not that it helps anyone, since I don’t have any memory of it after all this time.

Let this be a lesson about why it’s a good idea to keep good requirements documents as well as project logs (or a “decisions” document).  This old project was one that grew “organically” out of some smaller application and it was never documented and the customer wasn’t interested in spending any money to create documentation.  That was also the reason that it was such a cast iron bitch getting myself out of it.  If you are the one who best understands the code and there isn’t any documentation, then they don’t want to let you move on to other work.  But after five years on the project they’d reached a point where it was all maintenance and I was going a bit nuts.  It took a full year after I requested a new assignment before I was allowed to move.  I moved to another project in January 2001 and it took until late 2002 before they were really self-sufficient (the really annoying part was that I had to give them the same lessons several times, usually after they claimed to have “lost” their notes from the previous “knowledge transfer” session).