Legacy applications come with heavy baggage. The first problem is that the application is not designed as per the current standards. And there were so many chances that it was developed in a hodge-podge manner. During the initial stages, when the application has been under the process of building, documentation was not taken care of. Once the product started selling in the market, clients started asking for documentation to understand and implement the functionalities. Then, the company understands the importance of documentation and hires a few Technical Writers for Guide-writing. But here, the catch-in is that it is quite difficult at this point to gather product's process-related material because nobody knows completely about the product.
All legacy applications, which lack documentation for their critical processes, project this kind of problem to the writers. The common solution recommended for this kind of typical problem is that writers have to sit and play with the product so that they can understand the nuances of the product functionality. The second alternative is to call for a meeting with all the relevant departments including Sales, Pre-Sales, Business Analysts, and Design team and conduct a functionality walkthrough so that everyone can chip-in something about the functionality from their point of view. The third alternative is to take the help of Development team and request them to go through the code so that the functionality behind that particular feature can be understood and documented properly.
In summary, before documenting the functionality of a legacy application, it is always better if the writers take the help of all relevant departments of the company into confidence before they start working on the Guide. Always Understand, Verify and Validate (UVV) the given functionality before you start writing about it.
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