Question

Often there are situations where a project is passed on someone else. And often this process is unpleasant for both sides – the new owner complains about horrible documentation, bugs and bad design. The original owner is then bothered for months with questions about the project, requests to fix old bugs etc.

I might soon be in a situation where one of my projects will be given to someone else so I can focus on my other projects. I wonder what should I do to make this transfer as smooth as possible. What i already have is a decent documentation, the code is quite good commented and i’m still improving it. Its a medium sized project, not very large but still its not something you can code in a week.

I’m looking for a list of things that should be done in order to help the future owner taking over the project and at the same time will spare me all those annoying questions like “and what does this function do, what purpose does this class have…”. I know documentation is a must – what else?

Note: although my project is in C++ i believe this is a language-agnostic question. If there are things you think are specific to some language, please mention them too.

Answer 1

Documentation, but on all levels:

• API docs
• High level architecture: What components are there, what are their relationships and dependencies
• For each component, a high level description pointing to important code sections
• Tutorials: If you want to do X, here’s how
• Data: What data does it use and how, database schemas
• Idioms: If you’ve created some idioms within your code, explain them

And, to start, give the guy a personal introduction to all of the above in person, hopefully doing some needed change in a pair programming way