Checklist for documenting a medium to large scale system architecture

Posted on 03 Feb, 2024

Some items that can help you document a undocumented legacy system.

• Identify common points of failure in the architecture.

• Identify uptime maintained in the last year (in 9s).

• Identify maintainer/dev team size.

• Identify specific version numbers of SDKs, APIs and packages used.

  • Identify if updating SDKs can break the system.

• Get entire server inventory list with os details.

• Create documentation for the deployment strategies.

• Create as many flowcharts/visual representations of the modules as possible. Way more than textual documents.

• Make notes. Make lots of notes. Don't discard/delete anything. When you are actually documenting things, make sure all the notes you have made are checked for inclusion.

Acknowledgements

• Big thanks to folks on developersIndia and The Engineerin Org discord for their inputs.