If it’s not written down, it didn’t happen.
Chapter 24Diplomatic Immunity
One of my earliest jobs gave me a lesson in the importance of using software engineering best practices, after a tragic accident left me responsible for an important database application.
I interviewed for a contract job at Hewlett-Packard to develop and maintain an application on UNIX, written in C with HP ALLBASE/SQL. The manager and staff interviewing me told me sadly that their programmer who had worked on that application was killed in a traffic accident. No one else in their department knew how to use UNIX or anything about the application.
After I started the job, I found that the developer had never written documentation or tests for this ...
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