Write your assumptions down

Last Update: 16.11.2018. By Jens in Newsletter

Keep a list of your assumption during development. After all, we’ll probably never ever answer all of our assumptions before we develop anything.

Keeping them in mind is a bad thing. You will forget them or they get blurry. Nor can others read it. And in the worst case, you might not even be around, so others know the assumptions.

Can’t tell you, how often I went through that experience to inherit an old code base and having all those WTF??? moments. And nobody knew the answers. Or even with new legacy code bases ( 6 months old code :-) ), where the CTO asked me “do you remember why we solve X in way Y?”

Keep a simple document and track your assumptions on the go. Especially for architecture and design stuff. For implementation specifics write it close to the code but maintain it. Seen too many comments in code which did not match the actual logic and implementation anymore.

-