Conquering the eight-tailed dragon - an attempt to deal with structural and behavioral complexities

Since the inception of software engineering in the late 1960´s, its main target to attack has been complexity of software. But until the mid 1990´s, software complexity mostly stemmed from its size, i.e. the larger, the more complex. Characteristics of software in the past decade changed drastically. They can be described with four epithets: ubiquitous, evolving, diverse and reliability-sensitive.