HACKER Q&A
📣 patatino

A system so information/changes do not get lost


What are good systems for a case like that? When you have a complicated contract, a change also triggers other parts that must be updated manually.

Some checks which prevent people from forgetting those other changes?

I do not know in which direction I have to search.

  👤 Jtsummers Accepted Answer ✓
No idea for contracts, but in the technical field we have systems like Rational DOORS, called "requirement management tools". These allow you to set up forward and back links for different elements and across documents so that a change triggers a review of all potentially impacted elements.

These aren't terribly popular, but I like DOORS as a concept (that is, I like what I got from it, I did not care for DOORS itself and was glad to not be the administrator managing it). It greatly reduced missed checks for complex systems with multiple levels of documentation and materials. In my industry (aviation & defense) it's pretty much the tool that anyone uses, if they don't do it manually with Excel and Word documents, so I can't offer any advice on alternative tools that cover the same tasks.

👤 bckr
I suspect you might want to generate your documents from a template. You can then implement rules for how things get updated in code.
👤 pizza
Append only data structures/DBs, eg (reactive, I guess in your use-case?) persistent data structures, CRDTs, generational arenas, or other semigroup monoids