[bmitc]

This is really good advice. Thanks for sharing this. I think you've probably nailed it on the head about trying to find the reason and it likely being because people are too afraid of the risk of messing stuff up, so they keep adding to the ball of mud.

However, in my experience, it can be very touch and go dealing with people who become so risk averse. I had a job one time where a previous employee refused to give up a computer that had to be at least 10-15 years old at the time (was running Windows 2000 or something like that) and took about 30 minutes to boot up. Because somehow it was the only computer that could run the 3D CAD program he was familiar with or some other "reasons" that it was essential to the project. The only way of moving forward was that he luckily completely washed his hands of the project before I even joined the company, and then I did a full rewrite and redesign of the whole system from scratch (which was absolutely required in that case). Even then, when I asked him about the computer to just be careful and do due diligence to try and figure out why or if it was actually important, he was very resistant of me sending the computer to the salvage department after getting the files off the computer.