> the theory of the program as it exist in the minds of the development
> team might not be fully available for reconstruction from just the
> final code and docs
As an obvious and specific source of examples, all the features they decided to omit, "optimizations" they considered but rejected for various reasons, etc. are not present in the code and seldom in the comments or documentation.
Occasionally you will see things like "Full search rather than early exit on match to prevent timing attacks" or "We don't write it in format xyz because of patent issues" or some such, but the vast majority of such cases pass unremarked.
> team might not be fully available for reconstruction from just the
> final code and docs
As an obvious and specific source of examples, all the features they decided to omit, "optimizations" they considered but rejected for various reasons, etc. are not present in the code and seldom in the comments or documentation.
Occasionally you will see things like "Full search rather than early exit on match to prevent timing attacks" or "We don't write it in format xyz because of patent issues" or some such, but the vast majority of such cases pass unremarked.