The Developer's Code

Essay 28

Complexity as a Game of Pickup Sticks

Pickup sticks is an old children’s game where you try to remove individual plastic sticks from a pile without disturbing the others. You start the game by holding a bundle of sticks in your hand and letting them go. Most of the sticks fall in a pile in the middle, while a select few roll away from the center.

The object is to remove as many sticks as you can from the pile, one at a time, without disturbing the other sticks. You lose your turn if any other sticks in the pile are disturbed.

Maintaining complex software sometimes feels a lot like this game. Each stick represents a feature or function. Sometimes a feature can live outside and completely away from the others. Other times it affects ...