Title: I&#x27;ve recently been involved with a few line-of-business projects recently that have been fairly successful. They all use well-honed agile principles, and they met the requirements that their Product Owners had of them, and by all measures were successful.<p>However, simultaneously, I&#x27;m seeing a great deal of technical complexity being introduced to systems: microservices and SPAs (with all the attendant web stack complexity) being the most common. A lot of it seems to be driven by a need for developers to keep their CVs shiny, or because smart developers want cool things to play with, or because of &quot;Google envy&quot;. There seems to be very little engineering justification for these approaches in most cases, and technically simpler approaches would work better.<p>I&#x27;ve been thinking about Fred Brooke&#x27;s Mythical Man Month, in which he described 2 forms of complexity: Accidental Complexity as being technical in nature, while Essential complexity relating to the problem domain, and being more intractable.<p>Although Essential complexity remains stubborn in business systems, I believe we are slowly getting to the point where it is being tamed through more responsive (agile) dev practices, leading to happier customers who get software that does what they expect. On the other hand, I feel that accidental complexity is exploding, and for the first time in my career, it is growing at a faster rate than essential complexity, and masking a lot of the gains we are getting from improved processes. Is this a fair observation, or am I just jaded?
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