Is it worth it doing in depth analysis if you’re working alone?

Greetings,

Let’s preface this, I’m not asking if it’s worth doing analysis AT ALL. Of course it is. It’s always useful and it’s been greatly useful to me as well.

The thing is unlike what I was expecting in school, I didn’t end up working with a big software development team of 6~20 people. I did in a previous job, but not in my current one.

In my current job, we are a total of 3 people, and do more maintenance and small changes to our very few softwares than big changes. And we don’t have a big team of devs on the case. It’s usually we each take something to do, and do it.

Now, I recently learned about technical debt, and I can already see that the other two are accumulating it, but I’m the new hire, fresh out of school, so I can’t really (yet) telle them they’re making problem for the future (in particular when the big boss is one of the two IT)

Back on topic, I’ve started doing analysis for the project at hand and thank god I did. I realize how much I had to learn about the company’s internal working and even managed to snuff out a couple of problem that had been left to fester, wasting about 3 hours of work a week because of a misunderstanding. I have no doubt that analysis is useful.

But the project I did isn’t… that big? I mean it was limited to duplicating an existing system (writing a list on screen) and slightly changes the way it interacts (basically, I’m not transferring a list of objects, but rather an aggregation of lists that I then need to threat separately. Same thing, but instead of doing it for one list, I need to make it for each lists. There are others quirks, but that’s the gist of it)

And honestly, the past 4 days, writing analysis felt… wasted. Analysis is supposed to help the problem become clear, and can be more easily solved. The thing is, once the project is finished, it loses a lot of value. The part about the origin of the problem and how to solve it are still relevant, but all the technical stuff that is no longer a “how we want it to be” but rather a “how it is currently” loses value as people learn how it is. And considering I’m the only on that’s going to use it, I feel like I would get a lot more mileage out of a good problem analysis, so that we understand why we did it, and how we decided to solve it and a good doc on how it now work rather than all the technical stuff that is already obsolete as I was developing it over the course of the analysis (I needed to understand the program, that has NO DOC and NO COMMENT, so after analyzing the problem, while I was trying to understand the code, I was already seeing the solution.) So I felt like the last 4 days have been pretty much wasted, as have went far past the amount of analysis I, as both the analyst and dev, required.

Maybe I just missed something (wouldn’t put it past me, as I said I’m fresh out of school and have no pretension of knowing it all) but, in particular right now where I’m forced to be home working, I can’t reasonably put my result in test (I’m not at work to see the results) and all I can do is complete the missing part of the analysis but I feel so wasted doing work that’s just going to have no value. I’d much rather wait to go back to work and test my stuff so I can write the the proper finished doc, that will at least be useful if we need to go back on it later on.

Thanks for your help.