I was once on a project where all the original developers suddenly disappeared and it was taken over by a new team. All institutional knowledge had been lost.
We spent a ridiculous amount of time trying to figure out the original design. Introduced quite a few bugs until it was better understood. But also fixed a lot of design issues after a much head bashing.
By the end, it had been mostly rewritten and extended to do things not originally planned.
I once took over a project that was built by someone in Mexico and all the function names and variables were kind of obscure Mexican slang words, and I don't know any Spanish. That was probably the most frustrating project I've ever worked on.
I was once on a project where all the original developers suddenly disappeared and it was taken over by a new team. All institutional knowledge had been lost.
We spent a ridiculous amount of time trying to figure out the original design. Introduced quite a few bugs until it was better understood. But also fixed a lot of design issues after a much head bashing.
By the end, it had been mostly rewritten and extended to do things not originally planned.
But the process was painful.