Tribal Memory

As the code written today becomes part of tomorrow´s inexorably growing pile of legacy, preserving these stories becomes increasingly important. It´s costly to rely on informal storytelling to preserve and communicate important decisions; it´s incredibly costly to try to recreate those decisions and their rationale when the storytellers themselves are gone. Insofar as a software development organization can codify its tribal memory and keep its decisions alive, it can make evolving that system materially easier.