I used to work at JPL (and coincidentally was given an opportunity to work on Voyager to update some ground software, but ultimately I passed on it since I was

I used to work at JPL (and coincidentally was given an opportunity to work on Voyager to update some ground software, but ultimately I passed on it since I was way over committed at the time.) JPL has a formal database that maintains all its requirements documentation. Though, it isn't very user friendly; and you generally have to know what you are looking for. When I was there, most of the knowledge transfer happened by talking to the older folks around. As a result, I ended up developing close work relationships with people who had been there for 20-40+ years. The historical context they provided on current and past designs was incredibly useful, and not something you would find in a requirements document. Software was a different matter. Until recently, when the internal GitHub was introduced, finding and digging through code was not as straightforward. Each team/section maintained their own repos. And there was very little consistency, some used subversion, others cvs, accurev, etc, so it made it difficult to find and read code for projects outside your purview. Naturally, this led to software fiefdoms. In contrast, I work at google now, which is the polar opposite: I can effectively read through the entirety of google3 and send a CL/patch to just about anyone.