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A Note on Essential Complexity

The fact that we can’t remove essential complexity with a software redesign doesn’t mean that there’s nothing we can do about it. What if the problem definition wasn’t outside of our purview? What if we could get the world to conform to the software, and not just the other way around?

Subtle semantic differences aside, both authors of No Silver Bullet and Out of the Tar Pit agree in that there’s an essence to a problem: something that engineers can’t change, that the system must conform to, and that contributes a type of complexity that cannot be escaped. This doesn’t come as a surprise to us: we’ve been seeing for decades how human behavior (and user expectations) can be shaped by software: instant messaging, social media, content streaming —all drastically changed our everyday habits. Strictly following Moseley and Marks’s definition, the fact that we can get the user (or the customer, or the product owner) to accept a change of requirements, implies that the removed complexity wasn’t essential in the first place.

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