bethesque

Strategies

• Form a mental model of the process taking place. Write it down in words or draw a diagram. Validate that each step in your model is accurate, not just the one you think is failing.
• Another way to approach the above point - think of all the things that affect the running code, and work out which are the most likely to have an effect. Don't rule out the unexpected ones though. Think how you could test your understanding of, or rule out a problem with, each of the aspects.
  • your code (and different versions thereof)
  • other libraries (and different versions thereof)
  • application server (and different versions thereof)
  • language interpreter, compiler and/or virtual machine (and different versions thereof)
  • properties files
• environment variables

TimothyJones

Handover documentation

Here's a list of things I find useful to check off when writing handover documentation for source code.

General sanity checks

These get checked at the end, but they're at the front of the document because they're good to keep in mind the whole time

• Do these instructions work cross-platform? If not, which platform do they work on?
• If the source of truth is not this document, should some of the questions be answered with links (to eg confluence/other repos)