Law of increasing complexity

“As a large program is continuously changed, its complexity, which reflects deteriorating structure, increases unless work is done to maintain or reduce it.”
- Complexity, in part, is relative to a programmer’s knowledge of a system
  - Novices vs. experts doing maintenance
- Cleaning up structure is done relatively infrequently
  - Even with the recent interest in refactoring, this seems true. Why?

“As a large program is continuously changed, its complexity, which reflects deteriorating structure, increases unless work is done to maintain or reduce it.”