Yes we are over complicating it, but that it primarily about trying to take what is essentially an artistic process and turning it into a regimented process (a known hard problem).
Rob Gingell at Sun stated it as a form of uncertainty principal. He said, "You can know what features are in a release or when the release will ship, but not both." It captured the challenge of aspirational feature development where someone says "we have to have feature X" and so you send a bunch of smart engineers off to build it but there is no process by which you can start with an empty main function and build it step by step into feature X.
That said, it got worse when we separated the user interface from the product (browser / webserver). And you're rants about microservices and continuous integration are really about releases, delivery, and QA. (the 'delivery time' of Gingell's law above).
These are complexities introduced by delivery capabilities that enable different constructions. The story on HN a few days about about the JS graphics library is a good example of that. Instead of linking against a library on your computer to deliver your application with graphics, we have the capability of attaching to a web service with a browser and assembling on demand the set of APIs and functions needed for that combination of client browser / OS. Its a great capability but to pull it off requires more moving parts.
Rob Gingell at Sun stated it as a form of uncertainty principal. He said, "You can know what features are in a release or when the release will ship, but not both." It captured the challenge of aspirational feature development where someone says "we have to have feature X" and so you send a bunch of smart engineers off to build it but there is no process by which you can start with an empty main function and build it step by step into feature X.
That said, it got worse when we separated the user interface from the product (browser / webserver). And you're rants about microservices and continuous integration are really about releases, delivery, and QA. (the 'delivery time' of Gingell's law above).
These are complexities introduced by delivery capabilities that enable different constructions. The story on HN a few days about about the JS graphics library is a good example of that. Instead of linking against a library on your computer to deliver your application with graphics, we have the capability of attaching to a web service with a browser and assembling on demand the set of APIs and functions needed for that combination of client browser / OS. Its a great capability but to pull it off requires more moving parts.