I do a lot of strategy with startups, often this is a business and technical person, CEO and CTO if you will. This paper really came from recent discussions. The paper presumes the technology being reviewed is entirely the creation or under the guidance of the CTO and the CEO is unable to get visibility into the condition of the software because it is written in code.

Social Network Complexity Click the PDF icon, to download and print the full paper.

A lot of executives I speak with, are deeply concerned about technical operations, but they feel they lack visibility into the underlying software enough to reach their own conclusions about features and design values.

Complexity is the salt in your proverbial software soup, it’s easy to put in, and nearly impossible to take out.

If you are a founder, director or executive at a high-tech company, you are likely confronted with issues of software quality and life-cycle status, on a regular basis.

Keeping software simple is not easy, especially when the way almost all company's measure an engineer's progress, is by the quantity of code they write, and not by the code they attempt to remove.

Ultimately, software complexity can make a system collapse under its own weight, but how do you know if your companies core technology is going the right direction, or if it is brittle and ready to break?

I hope that this short reference can provide the vocabulary to communicate, and the offer some values upon which to create an accurate framework for observation and measure of complexity-creep.