Integration and Degradation

Software projects start modestly enough — a general problem statement that we've set out to solve. But then they grow. And grow. Either the problem changes, or our initial assumptions about how to solve it were so flawed that we just that far off in guessing how difficult the problem actually was. How prepared we were with our existing domain knowledge. How difficult it would be to acquire people with the right skills. Its in these situations that we take a software project, experiencing a deficiency of some sort, and start integrating other software components. It is through this exercise of integration that we're introducing unintended consequences of bringing on new software components.