Do you agree with what Dick Brandon said regarding sex? Do not take this question too seriously!

Even though the quotation had a humorous intention, this does highlight a serious matter. One of the biggest difficulties that beset people trying to keep and improve systems – not to mention their initial growth, which is a lack of adequate detailed documentation. Though one can inspect a code listing and determine what a program does, it is very far by knowing why this works that way and what the underlying business rules were. Along with very old systems, this can become a case of ‘one step forwards, two steps back’ since the whole underlying design concept has been wholly lost due to a failure to remain documentation up to date. Onto a more prosaic level, failing to maintain the configuration records of documents up to date can waste huge amounts of time as people do very many works only to discover which they have been working along with a superseded version.