When someone leaves
Capture what a leaving person knows about the rules they decided, before their last day.
The code stays when an engineer leaves. The reasons behind it leave with them. US workers stay a median of 3.9 years with an employer (BLS, 2024), so in most companies the people who designed today’s systems have already started to move on.
The usual handover
A handover document lists services, repositories and on-call notes. It rarely says why the refund window is 30 days, why one region skips the fraud check, or which limit was set after an incident nobody else remembers.
With AppThentic
- Find what only they know. Coverage lists the rules where the leaving person is the owner or the only person with an answer. See Coverage.
- Rank it. Rules that change often or carry the most money and risk come first.
- Ask early. om asks them a few questions a day over their notice period, not a two-hour brain dump in their last week.
- Hand over ownership. Each rule moves to a new owner, who sees the approved reason with the original owner’s name and date.
After they’ve gone
Their answers stay in Organization Memory, attributed and dated. When a rule they explained changes, the new owner is asked to confirm the reason still holds.