I've never in twenty years of hardware and software work been in any situation where code maintenance was worth the money.

I worked for awhile at Verifone wherein all we did was open 15 year old Z80 source code and convert them for new export markets by adding foreign telco modem drivers, language prompts, and special I/O requirements.

It was assumed that we in the department were especially gifted programmers and mind-readers and therefore were selected and paid special to do this. The code we opened was not well documented and we would spend two to three weeks making the changes and getting them tested.

Even in that job, had the original programmer spent any time writing beautiful documentation, it wouldn't have changed anything. We were gurus and wouldn't have trusted the documentation and would have checked its code anyhow. My motto there: Trust in opcodes, not documentation.

I understand that companies like Microsoft have to document their code extensively so that they can later track down bugs and replace them with better bugs. But we are primarily talking about embedded systems in this forum. With exceptions of course, I'd submit that most code documentation beyond opcode sideline comments and routine headers are a waste of time.

aka j