The variety engineering method: analyzing and designing information flows in organizations
Information Systems and e-Business Management
A qualitative human-centric evaluation of flexibility in middleware implementations
Empirical Software Engineering
Journal of Systems and Software
International Journal of Computational Science and Engineering
A low complexity coordination architecture for networked supervisory medical systems
Proceedings of the ACM/IEEE 4th International Conference on Cyber-Physical Systems
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Distributed computing systems are becoming bigger and more complex. Although the complexity of large-scale distributed systems has been acknowledged to be an important challenge, there has not been much work in defining or measuring system complexity. Thus, today, it is difficult to compare the complexities of different systems, or to state that one system is easier to program, to manage, or to use than another. In this article, we try to understand the factors that cause computing systems to appear very complex to people. We define different aspects of system complexity and propose metrics for measuring these aspects. We also show how these aspects affect different kinds of people—viz. developers, administrators, and end-users. On the basis of the aspects and metrics of complexity that we identify, we propose general guidelines that can help reduce the complexity of systems. © 2007 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Complexity 12: 37–45, 2007 This paper was submitted as an invited paper resulting from the “Understanding Complex Systems” conference held at the University of Illinois–Urbana Champaign, May 2005