The Micro-Cap Acquisition Where Undocumented Code Was the Whole Risk

The product had run for eleven years with minimal change and excellent retention. The original developer had left five years earlier. The current maintenance was performed by a contractor two days a month.

The finding

• No architecture documentation of any kind existed
• The build could only be reproduced on the contractor's machine
• No test suite, and no staging environment

Nothing was broken. Everything was unknown. The buyer proceeded with a retention arrangement for the contractor and a funded documentation project as a condition of closing.