Systems Architecture

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.