Nudging and boosting complex systems

What makes software complex and how we can nudge and boost complex systems towards patterns of operating that we desire.

In What do Quality Engineers do?

Each sub-system will interact with others, producing behaviours that are often hard to predict or replicate. And it's this interaction of sub-systems that leads to software being a complex process.

In this post, I'd like to expand on what makes software complex and how we can nudge and boost complex systems towards patterns of operating that we desire.

What is complexity?

We often see things like cars and software as complex. Things that are not simple but understood and knowable. For instance, how a car combustion engine works is well understood. Software is similar, and all languages must follow a specific syntax and be written in a particular way to compile and execute. But what is complex for one person might be pretty straightforward to another, so we need a shared understanding of what complexity is.

This is where we can borrow some ideas from the Cynefin framework (pronounced ku-nev-in). Going into Cynefin is beyond the scope of this post, but Cy…