Every so often I get asked to look at existing Sitecore installs and write up reports on what's good and what's not so good about them. I spend time looking at lots of stuff, like the infrastructure, the databases, the code and security. But time after time I find myself writing up a similar issue...
I've been involved in a few discussions about the scope of projects to upgrade existing Sitecore instances in the last few weeks, and quite a lot of that discussion has focused around the "development environment" aspects of the upgrade work. So I thought I would write down some of the things that have come up in my conversations.