Abstract :
All complex systems fail, by some measure of the word "fail," with consequences ranging from benign to catastrophic. This article examines the process of to triage in the face of a failing system. Software-intensive systems bring their own wickedness to the world because they have an essential complexity. They bring fundamental challenges to discrete systems, since they exhibit noncontinuous behavior, often embody a combinatorial explosion of state space, and may be corrupted by unexpected external events. Furthermore, as a discipline we lack the mathematical tools and as humans we fall short of the intellectual capacity to model the behavior of ultralarge discrete systems.Furthermore, discrete software-intensive systems often exhibit nonlinearity, broken symmetry, and, due to nonholonomic constraints, what is called localized transient anarchy.
