regarding problems and engineering, lets see how brooks puts it: "Essential complexity is caused by the problem to be solved, and nothing can remove it" so th

regarding problems and engineering, lets see how brooks puts it: "Essential complexity is caused by the problem to be solved, and nothing can remove it" so the kind of complexity with have to tackle comes from the area of application we are in, not the programming task itself. its not about writing pretty, bugfree java code. let's assume your java is 100% perfect. there still remains the essential complexity of the problem. now if the problem is in any way related to humans (a lot of software has to be 'a solution' for humans) then there is no way to proof a solution to be The Right One. hence B/B testing. this is at some stages the way to got. show something & get feedback from the user, who knows more about the problem (himself) than you. this of course doesn't mean it's all blind trial&error - well in a way it is, but humans get better at that over time. disclaimer: if you program the fuel-control for a rocket that is 30 years old, you can of course calculate the correct solution and resolve all essential complexity to mathematical formulas. interestingly this was not the case for the first rocket-programmers, since the rockets kept changing every few month :)