- A document, somewhere, with these bootstrap instructions in it. I've walked into several projects where the bootstrap instructions were "ask Joe." Now, Joe is a great guy and all but Joe probably has another job by now if he's still around at all. Joe might not remember all the details. Joe might have gotten hit by a truck last week. Bummer. Write this stuff down in a file and check it in. Put it on a wiki. Email it to the entire project team.
- Where can I find the source? Hopefully the answer is "in subversion."
- How do I configure my development environment? Be sure to mention which version of the editor (e.g. Eclipse, Visual Studio) created the project files. There's more to the dev environment than just the source though. Include references to development database instances and schemata, usernames, passwords, test data, etc.
- How do I run the software on my dev host? Running a project up may require stubs, configurators, magic files, directory structures, environment variables, etc.
- How do I run the tests? You did write tests, didn't you? Make sure to mention which suites exist and why. For example, it's interesting to know that you have unit, integration and acceptance tests available to you. Just looking at Java source, you might miss Ruby or Javascript tests in the project.
- Who understands this project well enough to answer questions about it from a business perspective? When you start enhancing and bug fixing domain expertise may become your scarcest commodity.
- Where is my validation environment and how to I deploy to it? These things tend to decay so be prepared to spend some time resurrecting the validation environment.
- What is the procedure to deploy to production?
So there's the trail. Enough?