As children, we ask endless questions. Why is the sky blue? Why do birds fly? Why do we have to go to school?
At some point, most of us stop asking. Perhaps we have built a sufficiently complete mental model of the world to function without constantly questioning it. We become occupied with doing rather than understanding.
I have noticed something else. The real problem is not that people stop asking. It is that we stop preserving the answers.
I experienced this personally after both my parents passed away. They left behind many possessions, but not always the stories that explained why those possessions mattered. Some objects remained meaningful because I already knew their history. Others became impossible to interpret. Without their explanation, they became little more than objects.
I have seen exactly the same phenomenon in software. In one company, existing business process descriptions were discarded because they were considered unnecessary. Later, during acceptance testing, we had to reconstruct those very processes from scratch because nobody could confidently explain how the business was supposed to work.
The software survived. The answers did not. That experience made me realise that documentation is often misunderstood.
We tend to think documentation exists to describe systems. Perhaps its deeper purpose is to preserve the answers to the important questions, like:
- Why does this product exist?
- Why was this architectural decision made?
- Why does this business rule exist?
- Why is this object important?
The answers may be preserved in different places. BDD scenarios preserve answers about expected behavior. Architecture Decision Records preserve answers about technical choices. Business documentation preserves answers about organizational intent. Even personal stories preserve answers about why certain possessions became meaningful.
No single document can answer every question. What matters is that the answers survive somewhere. Increasingly I find myself thinking that good stewardship—whether of software, products or personal history—is not about preserving artifacts. It is about preserving the understanding that makes those artifacts meaningful.
Perhaps every generation inherits objects. Our responsibility is to ensure they also inherit the answers.
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