The software ran the business, and nobody could explain it
A twenty-year-old B2B leasing platform · Anonymized
Twenty years of software running the business, and no documentation at all.
All of it written down: every object, every field, every rule and every workflow.
The documentation became the specification for what replaced the system.
The problem
Twenty years of software running the business, and no documentation. Not out of date. Absent. There was no onboarding, so clients were handed a system they could not use. The people supporting it could not explain it either, because nobody had ever taught them. The outside developers who built it would not train anyone and would not write anything down, and getting a straight answer out of them was its own project. Every rule lived in somebody’s memory. Some of those people had already left.
What I built
All of it, written down, top to bottom, in under four months and alongside the daily support work.
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Every object, and what it is actually for.
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Every field, and what breaks downstream if it changes.
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Every rule and every workflow, including the exceptions nobody had mentioned.
Proof
Support got faster, because you could look up what a field was for and what happened next, instead of asking a colleague who might not know either. The bigger result was not the plan. Once the system was described completely, it could be rebuilt. The documentation became the specification for what replaced it. You cannot replicate a system nobody can describe, and that is why most companies stay on software they have outgrown.
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