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One of the anti-patterns I encountered in previous workplaces is that of the “Knowledge in the Ether”. Quoting from my original post:
One anti-pattern I noted in a previous workplace was what I called “Knowledge in the Ether”: most of the instructions for getting the application up and running, and a lot of the collective knowledge were not written down in a collective place. TDDPirate said he was familiar with it and called it the “Oral Torah” syndrome.
The solution for this is simple: set up a wiki for the company, and instruct people to write a note there whenever they need to explain to someone how to do it (or give a link to a previous note), instead of guiding him how to do it. While this requires some discipline and getting used to, it can also be done after the fact.
Obviously the amount of knowledge in people’s head and in the Ether can never be completely eliminated. But it should be kept down to a minimum.
There was also a comment there that said that if one encounters a repetitive task, they should write a script to do that. And it’s a good idea to keep good README files, comments, etc. and to use a standard building procedure, or prepare distribution-level packages for the program.
Nevertheless, a workplace should encourage its employees to note down every useful knowledge and procedure. My friend once told me that in his previous workplace they kept a knowledge-base as a group of Microsoft Word documents stored inside a Visual SourceSafe repository. As a result, people felt it was too complicated to update and maintain them. Eventually, he set up an instance of MediaWiki there, which proved to be much more convenient, accessible and quick.