* * * * *
                                        
                Software archaeology is apparently a real thing
                                        
> My job now was to smuggle these documents back into the company. I would be
> happy to just hand them over. But that doesn't make any sense to the
> company. The company officially has these documents (digitally managed!),
> and officially I don't. In reality, the situation is the reverse, but who
> wants to hear that? God knows what official process would let me fix that.
> 
> … 
> 
> Oh, and as an external consultant, I'm not allowed to know some of the
> trade secrets in the documents. The internal side of the team needs to
> handle the sensitive process information, and be careful about how that
> information crosses boundaries when talking to the external consultants.
> Unfortunately, the internal team doesn't know what the secrets are, while I
> do. I even invented a few of them, and have my name on some related
> patents. Nonetheless, I need to smuggle these trade secrets back into the
> company, so that the internal side can handle them. They just have to make
> sure they don't accidentally repeat them back to me.
> 

Via Flutterby [1], “Institutional memory and reverse smuggling [2]”

This sounds like a cautionary tale of what happened to Stonehenge [3] or the
Pyramids of Giza [4]—they were built, but now years later the project
documentation got misfiled somewhere [5] and we're stuck with trying to
reconstruct how it happened.

Actually, now that I think about it, it also sounds like a lot of software
projects [6].

Hmmm … oh my … no … just no (Software archaeology—don't forget your bullwhip)
[7] …

[1] http://www.flutterby.com/archives/comments/14917.html
[2] http://wrttn.in/04af1a
[3] http://www.stonehenge.co.uk/
[4] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Pyramid_of_Giza
[5] http://hitchhikerguidetothegalaxy.blogspot.com/2006/04/beware-of-
[6] http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2009/08/cobol-
[7] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Software_archaeology

Email Sean Conner at sean@conman.org

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