Business rules are buried
Important decisions live in code paths, database procedures, batch jobs and integration behaviour.
Legacy system documentation
Reconstruct the system knowledge your team no longer has.
Documentation recovery is useful when it becomes a basis for review and change, not another static document set.
Harten uses available application evidence to reconstruct behaviour, dependencies, data and interfaces, then carries that understanding into a reviewable current-system specification.
The problem
The code may still run after the knowledge around it has disappeared.
Long-lived systems accumulate missing documentation, conflicting descriptions and key-person dependency. Engineers then have to rediscover the application every time something important changes.
Documentation cannot be trusted
Existing documents may describe an earlier system or omit operational behaviour that matters now.
What Harten produces
Documentation that can become an application specification.
The aim is not exhaustive prose. It is enough structured, traceable knowledge for architects, engineers and business owners to review the system together.
Current-system account
Capabilities, behaviour, state, data, interfaces and technical relationships within scope.
Evidence and gaps
Source support for material findings, plus questions the available evidence cannot answer.
Reviewable specification
A common baseline for deciding what must be preserved, changed or investigated further.
Human review
Generated documentation is a draft until the evidence and interpretation are checked.
- Correct errors: unsupported references and mistaken interpretations are fixed.
- Separate unknowns: genuine application uncertainty is not confused with generated error.
- Add context: domain and operational owners resolve knowledge that source cannot establish.
- Record decisions: accepted behaviour and intended change remain distinguishable.
From documentation to change
Use the recovered specification as the baseline for the next decision.
That may be a modernisation plan, architecture option, recovery decision or a clearer handover to a delivery partner.