Documentation : Just Do It!
Seriously. Asking questions or trying to actually find someone is so much worse.
As a software engineer you’re already skilled in the technical aspects of daily life in the grand game such as endlessly tapping the space bar when programming in Python, promising revenge on people who used tabs in their yaml files, or repeatedly searching for Google authenticator on your mobile phone every time you try to login to a source repository.
It’s a fine life, especially since dealing with people is usually pretty much a last resort and that’s the way we like it.
Unfortunately there’s a particular time when human to human¹ interaction is necessary and that’s what someone’s failed to write the necessary documentation for something technical.
Non-technical project documentation is, of course, irrelevant and isn’t worth the paper it’s printed on (nor the bytes dedicated to its storage). No one reads the current project’s managerial / process documentation during a project, let alone go back to read something belonging to a previous project like a particularly engrossing Gantt chart or the hours wasted on the definition and distribution of agile story points.
Actually, I do tell a lie, we do sometimes go back and pull up sprint ‘retrospectives’ for the self-aggrandising hilarity they contain about a ‘job…
