Strategies for handling Software Complexity. TL;DR - Your project will change over time, have a process for change (retrospectives) and allow for different ways of doing things in phases of the project.

1. Strategies for handling
Software Complexity
Gabe Hamilton

2. Problems Complexity

3. Plan
Prototype
Almost Done
Complete
More detail = more moving parts = more complexity

4. Problems
Interacting Pieces
Hundreds of components
Multiple teams
Causes Emergent Behavior

5. Chaos Theory
“Unstable aperiodic
behavior
in deterministic nonlinear
dynamical systems.”

6. Complexity Theory
“Numerous independent elements
continuously interact”

7. Strategies
We deal with complex systems by breaking them
down.
One way we can break them down is by level of
complexity.

8. Kun-iv-in
Cynefin
Just how much
complexity are we
talking about here?

9. Complex
Cause <- Effect
Complicated
Cause -----> Effect
Obvious
Cause -> Effect
Chaotic
Cause? Effect?
Unknown
/
Disorder

10. Obvious
Cause -> Effect
Build a checklist and follow it
Scale it up
Businesses dream of these problems

11. Complicated
Cause -----> Effect
Domain of Experts
Most of us knowledge workers are trained
for these type of problems

12. Complex
Cause <- Effect
“Emergent patterns can be perceived but not predicted”
The last project was successful because we did X,Y,Z, we
need to do X,Y,Z on this project. Wrong

13. Strategy: Adaptation
Adaptation is the
key practice of
Agile Software
Development

14. No problem:
We have Retrospectives
It is ok that this project feels different than
the last one.
The beginning has a different pace than the middle, or the
weeks before launch, or initial usage, or scaling.

15. Projects exist in a
Complex Domain
So We Adapt
to market conditions to new tools
to team composition to new problems
To what is working now

16. “
“Good leadership is not a
one size fits all
proposition.
-https://hbr.org/2007/11/a-leaders-framework-for
-decision-making

17. Questions?

18. “
Velocity Measures
Are specific to projects
and teams
You need to normalize

19. “
Ruining an informational
metric by incentivising it