While you do provide some noteworthy examples, I fail to see how they would not have been avoided by simply keeping all process docs in some kind of revision control system and making sure they were updated with each new discovery. They seem like fairly straightforward cases of failure to update the documentation. RCSes make this even easier nowadays.
When I manage teams, we create a "definition of done" and make sure that no deliverables are considered complete unless each item has been checked off. A common item on the checklist is "Documentation has been updated for any relevant changes in software behavior or expectations." Other common items would be "Any publicly-consumed APIs have been documented, with common usage examples," and "All important non-obvious architectural decisions have been well-documented with comments."
Something as basic as a missing ingredient in a recipe would be a catastrophic documentation failure.
Really recommend the book "The Shock of the Old" some great examples of forgotten tech but also long this line of forgetting, there is also the persistence of many old technologies, far beyond their narrative expiry.
The chapter on flush pop rivetting in "What engineers know and how they know it: A History of the aircraft industry 1918 to 2002" by ... Damn I forgot..
If you go to youtube and look up some videos about restoring historical aircraft, sometimes you can see this process of lost details in action. For example they have a machine to restore and they don't know what a certain part of it is, or they don't know exactly how the pieces of the plane were attached to one another. And the restorations of these planes end up costing millions of dollars. Several millions seem to have been spent on getting De Havilland Mosquitos into the air.
The condition of Axis aeroplanes is even worse. There are some remaining Heinkel 111s but none flying any more, and there are just wrecks of the Focke-Wulf Condor, which they barely knew how to put back together. The knowledge of these aeroplanes has simply disappeared, leaving people trying to puzzle them out from wrecks found at the bottom of fjords.
"Du hast den Farbfilm vergessen" interestingly was shunned by Nina Hagen herself when Angela Merkel had it play, as the text writer was a convicted sexual predator and the song about domestic abuse as well.
"Everything hurts so much" ... "Do that again, Micha, and I leave" ... "Everything blue and white and green and not true anymore later" ...
While you do provide some noteworthy examples, I fail to see how they would not have been avoided by simply keeping all process docs in some kind of revision control system and making sure they were updated with each new discovery. They seem like fairly straightforward cases of failure to update the documentation. RCSes make this even easier nowadays.
When I manage teams, we create a "definition of done" and make sure that no deliverables are considered complete unless each item has been checked off. A common item on the checklist is "Documentation has been updated for any relevant changes in software behavior or expectations." Other common items would be "Any publicly-consumed APIs have been documented, with common usage examples," and "All important non-obvious architectural decisions have been well-documented with comments."
Something as basic as a missing ingredient in a recipe would be a catastrophic documentation failure.
Really recommend the book "The Shock of the Old" some great examples of forgotten tech but also long this line of forgetting, there is also the persistence of many old technologies, far beyond their narrative expiry.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Shock_of_the_Old
The chapter on flush pop rivetting in "What engineers know and how they know it: A History of the aircraft industry 1918 to 2002" by ... Damn I forgot..
If you go to youtube and look up some videos about restoring historical aircraft, sometimes you can see this process of lost details in action. For example they have a machine to restore and they don't know what a certain part of it is, or they don't know exactly how the pieces of the plane were attached to one another. And the restorations of these planes end up costing millions of dollars. Several millions seem to have been spent on getting De Havilland Mosquitos into the air.
The condition of Axis aeroplanes is even worse. There are some remaining Heinkel 111s but none flying any more, and there are just wrecks of the Focke-Wulf Condor, which they barely knew how to put back together. The knowledge of these aeroplanes has simply disappeared, leaving people trying to puzzle them out from wrecks found at the bottom of fjords.
Those spherical cows were of uniform density, by the way. I don't know why this popped into my mind, but the metaphor appears incomplete without this.
"Du hast den Farbfilm vergessen" interestingly was shunned by Nina Hagen herself when Angela Merkel had it play, as the text writer was a convicted sexual predator and the song about domestic abuse as well.
"Everything hurts so much" ... "Do that again, Micha, and I leave" ... "Everything blue and white and green and not true anymore later" ...