[birthdaywizard]

We call this "code archeology" at my company.

We're more diligent about ticket descriptions these days, but we weren't always. Obviously the best is to be able to to talk to people, followed by documentation, either explicit documentation or on the ticket itself .

After that it can be useful to look at all commits that were related to the change itself. You can often piece together why something was done from looking at how the changes happened as whole, or even which parts were rewritten as requirements changed.

Another option is to talk to people in your org closer to clients. Support or client managers can sometimes have a better idea of how features are actually used, meant to be used, or what parts are more valuable than product or engineering will, especially if they're revisiting a feature for the first time in many years.

But yeah, often you can't. You're best bet then is to make sure you really understand the feature look at it with fresh eyes. Say "Well this is how it DOES behave, how do we want it to behave from here?" Actually talking to clients can be helpful here if any of them are willing to talk to you. In enterprise software, you can probably find a client who wants to shape the direction of the feature and has some strong thoughts.