Some years ago (before wikis and the www) I worked on a software product for recording Design Rationale - the decision making process that went into designing l

Some years ago (before wikis and the www) I worked on a software product for recording Design Rationale - the decision making process that went into designing long lived artfects, such as nuclear reactors and process plants. The idea being that engineers could find out WHY something had been done the way it had decades after the original engineers had retired or been run over by buses. The product failed, despite some intial interest from big companies. In retrospect one of the main reasons for the failure was social rather than technical. The engineers designing things saw recording the rationale as just an extra job that had to do, with no immediate benefit to them. If anything, they saw it as opening them up to more scrutiny and increasing the chance of their job being outsourced in future. So keep that in mind.