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My take away from this is you need to ask 'why' as often as 'what' and 'how' when developing software.

In my experience many software developers completely fail to challenge the 'why' of what they're being asked to do, and jump right to design/coding.

To be fair though, not all software developers work in an environment where they can, or feel they can, ask or challenge the 'why', but the software will only benefit if they do.

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Why? is also how you resolve the XY problem[1], and asking it five times[2] is the basis of a root cause analysis, and as any parent will tell you[3] is part of raising children, and is also what you should seek to put into a commit message[4].

Why? is almost always a good question to ask.

1. http://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/66377/what-is-the-xy...

2. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/5_Whys

3. https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=sahSAMj8OIY

4. https://github.com/erlang/otp/wiki/writing-good-commit-messa...

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