What should I ask the previous development team during my only (1-3hr) meeting?

Question

There is Ruby on Rails (1.8, 2.3.2) project. First version of project was made by some organisation. I will implement next versions of this project without any help from this organisation. I will be able to talk with developers from previous development team during meeting (1-3 hours).

Project statistics: ~10k LOC, 1.0/0.6 code to test ratio, rspec

What questions about project can you recommend to ask?

Answer 1

First review the entire project and to figure out as much as possible so you have context and can actually understand what they tell you.

Ask

• If you can record the conversation
• For an architectural overview
• Why they made certain architectural decisions over another
• A complete list of dependencies (if you can't figure that out on your own)
• What the biggest problems are
• Which parts of the projects are always / never being fixed
• What the Achilles' Heel of the project is
• What will cause the biggest headaches
• What security issues are there and what the constraint is to fixing it
• What would you do next if you were me?
• What you should know that you didn't ask (most important question)

Also, don't be judgemental, you want them to reveal any problems they know about. There are probably tons of things wrong with the app that they are embarassed about, which you need to know sooner rather than later. They're not going to open up to you if they don't trust you.

Answer 2

I would ask for a code walkthrough. Not line-by-line, but more for the overall structure of the project, relationships between individual modules, etc.