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Large-scale complex IT systems

<07> Based on work in the UK Large-Scale Complex IT Systems research programme, this controversial paper introduces 2 novel ideas – the notion of large-scale complex IT systems as interacting coalitions of systems with mutually suspicious members, and the notion that reductionist, top-down approaches to software engineering cannot scale to the creation of such coalitions. These are highly significant - they explain why most large-scale software projects are problematic and mean that current SE research is fundamentally limited and only partially applicable to large-scale systems. The paper proposes dynamic, non-deterministic, probabilistic approaches to software engineering rather than current static, deterministic approaches.