Field notes · 7 parts · Free to read
Is your estate written down?
Five questions, an hour with the team, and an honest count at the end.
For anyone who owns an OutSystems estate and is about to make a decision about it.
On this pageCan someone say the path in six steps?
Most teams believe their estate is documented because the platform is visual. The flows can be read, so the system must be described.
This is a short test of that belief. It takes about an hour with the people who build the system and the people who run it, in the same room. Nobody opens Service Studio until the end.
Part 1
Can someone say the path in six steps?
Pick the piece of work where a mistake costs money. Usually it is the one that ends in a file to finance.
Ask one person from the business to describe it from start to finish in five or six steps. Then ask a developer to do the same, separately.
Compare the two. If they match, good. If the business describes steps the developer leaves out, or the developer names steps the business has never heard of, the path is not written down anywhere. It is held in two halves by two groups.
Part 2
Can a core rule be said without the factory?
Take one rule on that path. How a part-period is charged, when a record is held back, who is allowed to approve.
Ask for it in one or two sentences of plain business language. No action names, no entity names, no “it depends, let me open it”.
A rule that can only be explained by opening the flow is a rule that only the flow knows. That is fine while the person who built the flow is in the building.
Part 3
Does anyone own the names?
Ask what the operators call the three or four main things on the screen. Then ask what those things are called in the data model.
In an estate that has lived a few years the two lists differ, and the differences are where new people lose their first month. If the mapping exists on a page, you pass. If it exists in one person’s head, write their name down as the answer.
Part 4
Is there a contract for what leaves?
List everything that leaves the system on this path: files, messages, integrations.
For each one, ask where the format is written down. Columns, order, formats, and what the receiving system assumes about them.
The common answer is that the receiving side has a spec from the original project and nobody has compared it with what is sent today. Count that as a no.
Part 5
Who can say what is dead?
Every mature estate carries entities from dropped features, actions that run once a year, and branches nobody has reached in a long time.
Ask who could say, with confidence, which parts of this path are no longer used. Then ask how they would know.
If the answer is a name, you have a key-person risk with a name on it. If the answer is silence, you have code that nobody dares to remove, and every estimate on this path is carrying it.
Part 6
Reading the result
Count the questions answered from a page that exists today, as opposed to from memory.
- Four or five. The path is written down. Check the date on the page and move to the next path.
- Two or three. Normal for a healthy team. The knowledge is real and it lives in people. It holds until the team changes.
- None or one. The factory is the only description of the system. Every estimate, handover and conversion plan starts with someone reading it again from the top.
The count matters less than the list of names you collected along the way. Those people are your documentation. Knowing who they are, and which question each of them answers, is the first useful page.
Part 7
What to do with it
Close one gap, on one path. Start with whichever question had the fewest people able to answer it.
The reason to do it now is timing. These questions are cheap to ask in a quiet month. They get expensive in the middle of an ODC conversion or a handover, when the same answers are needed by Friday. We wrote about why in Your OutSystems Estate Is Not Self-Documenting.
Scored lower than you expected?
Writing down the hardest path is part of how we run an estate assessment. If the only full description of your system is the factory, it is worth a conversation before the next big decision depends on it.