One of the key concepts we need to pay close attention to is complexity.
Have you ever worked on a codebase so complex that the entire team feared touching it?
For some authors, software development is an exercise in experimentation and discovery, always aimed at receiving feedback from clients and users.
Learning constantly and learning from feedback is the heart of software development; therefore, it is key for developers to adapt to new technologies and maintain their value over time in the market.
So, as software engineers, our objective is to become experts in managing complexity by applying concepts like
Modularity
Separations of concerns
Abstractions
Loose coupling
Out of control of complexity
When we lose sight of key principles like modularity or abstraction, complexity spirals out of control. This leads to:
Out of control tech debt
Bugs on development and production
The organization fears making changes to the project
The scariest consequence, in my experience, is when the team becomes afraid to change anything. That’s when progress dies, because it is the combination of the other two concepts plus other specific details like poor leadership, organization, and lack of quality values from the team, which, of course, always depend on the situation.
I’ve seen this firsthand.
At one company, I worked on an Angular 8 project that had slowly grown into a tangled mess. Bugs were everywhere. Refactoring took weeks. Eventually, leadership decided to throw it all away and migrate to React, claiming Angular was “too complex.”
But was the framework really the issue? Or was the real problem the lack of solid architectural foundations from the beginning?
Tight deadlines and poor architecture can silently harm software projects. This results in weak abstractions and neglected principles.
Conclusion
The key to managing software complexity is having a well-planned architecture from the start. Without it, bugs multiply, teams stall, and companies may end up rewriting entire systems from scratch.
Have you faced a similar situation? Share your story in the comments what went wrong, and what did you learn?
In the next post, I’ll break down key principles like modularity and separation of concerns, and how applying them saved me in real-world projects.
Thanks for reading!
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