Prospectively sizing up software complexity

If you study the objects in your everyday life, you'll realize that most of them are incredibly complex. Something as simple as paper requires a capital-intensive process industry with razor-thin margins and technology that exceeds any one person's ability to master.

It's generally understood that for example a house requires a significant collection of specialists to be built right. There's scarcely an object around that is made from scratch by one person, or even a group of people with the same skills. Everything requires close coordination of diverse specialists.

This is only barely catching on in software development. The roles of a software development team are ad hoc at best, and most organizations do a terrible job of establishing ways to coordinate their efforts.