>Well, there is always a reason why a request to enhance existing infrastructures would apply. And, when this happens, this is because the design has to be adjusted, a new framework is used, there are new employees doing additional tasks, it was time to expand the application, data normalization was applicable, etc.
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>And, whenever this is happening, we always find ourselves in the situation saying "Oh, I would have done that differently than what they did!". Well, it's just the way it is.
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>In many of them, some of those designs have been built at first with a minimum set of requirements. So, it was doing the job right. But, the company has expanded, the technology has moved on and the requirements kept coming in. So, after a while, the corporate people sat down and decided it was time to revamp the entire design. For most of my consulting, this is what I do. I don't work on existing code. I basically revamp the entire infrastructure by upscaling the application to actual technologies, implementating new development standards, doing data normalization and menthoring the team so they would be able to move on as soon as I finish my job.
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>But, in many situations, while analyzing existing code, yes, it is somewhat difficult to understand what is going on there. I found however that there is much more comments than it used to be. I also menthor that as well. The more you have in the code, the better it is. Having outside documentation is not pretty much welcome anymore other than the fact to provide the generic documentation on the naming convention, the framework and other related components. If you look at Rick Strahl's WWWC software, you will find a lot of comments. In some places, there is much more comments than lines of code. And, that is greatly welcome!

Just on the point of commenting I want to add. I was fortunate to work with the code of Mike Asherman in my previous work (I haven't seen him here lately and started to wonder how he is). He writes comments almost for every line of his code and really great comments. I learned a lot from him and while back admired his style, though on the same page he had a tendency to overcomplicate some things...

I saw good comments in Doug Henning's code as well when I was working on RI handler...