This cause is basically in many ways a secondary eect — much code is simply concerned with managing state or specifying control.

Complexity caused by Code Volume  

Some estimates software problems cost the Amer­ican economy $59 billion annually.

Software problems cost a lot

In the absence of language-enforced guarantees (i.e. restrictions on the power of the language) mistakes (and abuses) will happen. The more powerful a language (i.e. the more that is possible within the language), the harder it is to understand systems constructed in it.

Power corrupts

Complexity is the single major difficulty in the successful develop­ment of large-scale software systems.

Complexity is the major difficulty

The type of complexity we are discussing in this paper is that which makes large systems hard to understand. It is this that causes us to expend huge resources in creating and maintaining such systems.

Simplicity is Hard

Testing: This is attempting to understand a system from the outside — as a “black box”. Informal Reasoning: This is attempting to understand the system by ex­amining it from the inside.

Two widely-used approaches to understand­ing systems

“testing is hopelessly inadequate....(it) can be used very effectively to show the presence of bugs but never to show their ab­sence.”

Rely on testing at your peril

Dealing with complexity of software systems could be daunting. But there are some ways to tackle it.

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Two widely-used approaches to understanding systems

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Two Systems

The two-system theory

The Problem of Induction in Science