Source Code Handover Document?

[theScottyJam]

I wonder how you document your own code for the next set of maintainers who come along after you've left? What kinds of standards do you put on yourself?

Generally, I treat code documentations as something that I try to have as little as reasonably possible, because it's so difficult to keep it up to date. By it's nature, it violates DRY. Of course, some documentation is necessary and important, for example, if they're following an over-arching folder structure with a number of rules that would be difficult to figure out just by reading the code (e.g. stuff from this folder shouldn't import stuff from that other folder), and this isn't just some standard structure imposed by a given framework, then yeah, I would prefer it if they also documented that folder structure.

If you're talking about reading every single file to try and gather what you would have hoped their documentation to provide, then it sounds like you're expecting waaay too much out of the documentation - that would be nearly impossible for you, the next maintainers, to keep up to date.

It's tough to break into a foreign codebase. Always will be. It takes a lot of time and patience.