Why Development Teams are Throwing Away Institutional Knowledge -- and how to Preserve it

GOTO Chicago 2018

Decisions about how to solve problems while coding are made using tools that are completely divorced from the codebase itself. Every time a developer asks a question in Slack or email about a function or code snippet, the answer along with the question serve only the people involved in that interaction. Months or years later neither new developers nor the very people who solved the problem will have easy access to that knowledge. Inline comments and PR comments don’t solve the problem either for different reasons. The only way to preserve knowledge in a consistent and relevant way is for code to become self-documenting.