[mitthrowaway2]

Toyota calls it the gemba walk. Managers need to see how the factory is running with their own eyes. Not just live behind a desk and listen to what they hear in meetings.

A movie director can see the sets with their own eyes. But you can't see the state of a software codebase without reading and understanding the code, and the most surefire way to do that is to try to write something, even just documentation.

You don't assess the state of your software by walking around the office and looking at hands on keyboards. You look at the codebase.