When someone leaves
Capture what a leaving person knows about the rules they decided, before their last day.
The code stays when an engineer leaves. The reasons behind it leave with them. US workers stay a median of 3.9 years with an employer (BLS, 2024), so in most companies the people who designed today’s systems have already started to move on.
The usual handover
A handover document lists services, repositories and on-call notes. It rarely says why the refund window is 30 days, why one region skips the fraud check, or which limit was set after an incident nobody else remembers.
With AppThentic
- Find what only they know. Coverage lists the rules where the leaving person is the owner or the only person with an answer. See Coverage.
- Ask early. AppThentic asks them a few questions a day over their notice period, not a two-hour brain dump in their last week. Where a flow is easier to show than to write, they walk om through it on a screen-share call. See Asking the right questions.
- Hand over ownership. For each rule, AppThentic suggests a new owner from the people who review and change that code. Your admin confirms the choice, and the new owner accepts it. Until they accept, the rule shows that it has no owner.
How AppThentic knows someone is leaving
Your admin marks the person as leaving, with their last day. That starts the questions while there is still time to ask. When someone is removed from your company’s sign-in system (Okta, Google Workspace or Microsoft Entra ID) without being marked, AppThentic flags every rule they owned as needing a new owner.
What the new owner sees
The approved reason stays in the original owner’s words, with their name and the date they gave it. Nothing is rewritten under the new owner’s name. From then on, the new owner is the one asked when the rule changes or its reason needs checking.
After they’ve gone
Their answers stay in Organization Memory, attributed and dated. When a rule they explained changes, the new owner is asked to confirm the reason still holds.