[kbs666]

Let me come at this both as a long time coder and a project manager.

No one ever knows a complex project as well as the guy(s) who wrote it. That's just the nature of the beast. Only the most dedicated, and anal retentive sorts, produce useful documentation while writing code. I've gone back years after writing code on projects that had serious documentation standards that passed review and found my own documentation to be baffling in its opaqueness. Then after a while poking around my memory got jogged enough I remembered what I needed to know and I didn't even really need the documentation. But good luck and god help someone else trying to make head or tails of it.

From a project manager stand point I'd love to have a technical writer on every senior developers elbow documenting all the critical code in a major project. Now can I have double the budget? No? Ok. Can I get one tech writer to turn the barely English notes and code comments and automatically generated stuff into some sort of useful documentation of the project to bring new team member up to speed and to serve as a reference? No? Can I at least set up an internal wiki and get some budgeted staff hours to maintain it? No? Well shit. And that's on big projects with teams larger than 3 guys.

On a small project with only a few guys mostly driven by one person I'd personally be impressed that they have decent version control practices.