> The problem is that knowledge is mostly "tacit", and tends to grow as the software evolves
Totally agreed. I agree that the missing codification is the context that was needed at the genesis of the program -- the context necessary to understand it holistically.
Seems to me a valid way of understanding this problem is that there is a missing piece of documentation. It's generally well documented where/what the starting point product/business idea is as well as where/what the end point code is, but how point B was derived from point A is oftentimes not well documented. This method of derivation highly informs the structure of the result, and is a lossy conversion. It can be thought of as the "spirit" of a program/an org's engineering department (what happens in between the product ideas you can see going in and the lines of code output you can see coming out).
If that part, and the methods and techniques by which an org maps and translates an idea from the domain of business into the domain of code, is codified and documented and evolved alongside the programs the org produces then it may help.
Totally agreed. I agree that the missing codification is the context that was needed at the genesis of the program -- the context necessary to understand it holistically.
Seems to me a valid way of understanding this problem is that there is a missing piece of documentation. It's generally well documented where/what the starting point product/business idea is as well as where/what the end point code is, but how point B was derived from point A is oftentimes not well documented. This method of derivation highly informs the structure of the result, and is a lossy conversion. It can be thought of as the "spirit" of a program/an org's engineering department (what happens in between the product ideas you can see going in and the lines of code output you can see coming out).
If that part, and the methods and techniques by which an org maps and translates an idea from the domain of business into the domain of code, is codified and documented and evolved alongside the programs the org produces then it may help.