Since the pioneering paper by Belady and Lehman in 1976 [1], software engineers have suspected that software development, and post-development called “evolution” is a complex process ending with a complex system—the software product. These early pioneers may have been the first to analyze program defects and note their statistical behavior. The idea that a software product is an evolving system with measurable statistical properties (like molecules in a gas or heat transfer in solids) has recently gained renewed interest with the introduction of agile methods, and the application of big data analytics to the software development process itself [2]. Continue reading The Fractal Software Hypothesis
