Lehman’s Laws on software evolution demonstrate the complexity of software-intensive systems and the organization and process for developing them. I find the last law central to the whole theory: “E-type evolution processes constitute multi-level, multi-loop, multi-agent feedback systems and must be treated as such to achieve significant improvement over any reasonable base.”

We can demonstrate this with a little help from system dynamics theory. System dynamics tries to breakdown the complexity into variables and looks then at their interactions, and especially loops of interactions.