Conclusions

There you have it—55 facts and a few fallacies that are fundamental to the field of software engineering. You may have agreed with some of those facts and fallacies and disagreed with others. But I hope your creative juices were stimulated along the way and that your ideas for how we can do a better job of building and maintaining software have been made to flow.

Several underlying themes emerge from the facts and fallacies I’ve presented here.

•  The complexity of the software process and product drives a lot of what we know and do in the field. Complexity is inevitable; we shouldn’t fight it, so much as learn how to work with it. Fifteen of these facts are concerned with complexity, and a number of others are driven by it. ...

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