The Butterfly Effect { } in Complex (Software) Systems
I have been doing more hands-on software development in my new job and have experienced first hand (no pun intended) the principles of chaos, and not just because my skills had eroded. "the Butterfly Effect - the notion that a butterfly stirring the air today in Peking can transform storm systems next month in New York." ( Chaos: Making a New Science ) One time someone else's copy and paste error of calling another method with the wrong variable took me a long time to figure out as everything looked right at first glance. foo(string param1, string param2) { ... bar(param1, param1 ); ... } This was more like a mocking bird flapping its wings. Another time, my own error of a single character in a PowerShell caused the progam to stop working for a day. If a single character out of thousands of lines of codes isn't the butterfly effect then I don't know what is. Of course there is no tiny silver bullet for these dreaded Chine...