Define and Manage Software Complexity in the Enterprise

Development process

Software development is hard. There’s nothing like stating the obvious, right? So, it’s probably not surprising that many see complexity as related to the development process.

Dawid Kubiak, Schaeffler

“Complexity means how hard and time-consuming it will be to build out applications—how many and what kinds of integrations, how sophisticated UI should be, what it supports, what types of user inputs, and more.”

Jens Nitschke, FUCHS SE

“While we try to keep complexity to a minimum, we know we also need it. In our R&D work, we need flexibility to support and enable creativity to deliver our customers the best products and services. When you try to put flexibility in software tools, it often results in a tool with many buttons and functionalities, which eventually becomes overbearing and has the opposite effect that you wanted to achieve in the first place.”

Organizational inertia

But the process itself is only half the battle, or maybe even less than that, depending on the organization. Complexity can mean siloed development and duplicated efforts. It can mean distributed teams or, often, a structure that wasn’t built with today in mind.

Mark Bus, ABN AMRO

“Complexity is many IT teams taking the same challenges in silos from each other and, in other words, integrating individual applications with the same enterprise components and styling their app’s presentation layer to the same design system.”

Gonçalo Henriques, Schwarz IT KG

“Complexity means the struggle to find the right solution for a known problem.”

Derryn Zwart, Enexis

“I like to think about development like a clock. It needs cogs, big and small, to make it tick. But the more cogs and the more types of cogs, the more complex it becomes to keep the clock ticking. Complexity can be viewed from two perspectives: technical and business. Technical focuses on the cogs themselves and their interrelations. Business considers how and where to acquire inputs and transform them into desired outcomes.”

Complexity doesn’t have to be a detriment

Complexity can be seen as bad, but it doesn’t have to be. Complex needs require creative solutions, which can lead to innovations, provided you have the proper tools.

Bart Zantingh, ABN AMRO

“I don’t think of complexity as something stand-alone but as something that emerges from an organization’s processes, systems, and people.

Bad complexity comes from a large network of systems and the cross-dependencies between them when they’re set up in such a way that makes it hard to understand where one starts and another ends, who owns what, and when, where, and how to make that one change you need to get to your desired end result.

Good complexity (or at least complexity that isn’t in the way) is about flexibility, changeability, and maintainability. The system may be very complex but it’s also flexible, easy to understand, easy to change, and easy to maintain.

Complex systems aren’t something to be scared of, but complex systems that are hard to change are. An organization that works hard to ensure its systems remain flexible and relatively easy to change and react to new and changing environments as complexity increases is an organization that’s “conquered” complexity.”

Handle complexity across the enterprise with Mendix

Now that we have a better understanding of complexity, we can examine how Mendix helps mitigate bad complexity and harness the good.

Dawid Kubiak, Schaeffler

“With UI, we can quickly prototype and double-check our user needs, even adjusting in live time. Mendix helps visualize the steps, decisions, and microflows. I can show the microflows to people in the business, and we can look at the same thing together.”

Bart Zantingh, ABN AMRO

“Mendix helps detect that complexity early by providing the developer with all kinds of tools to inspect their models, scan the app for inconsistencies and bad practices, and even provide recommendations on how to solve them. Ultimately, the system designers, architects, business analysts, and software developers are responsible for not making a mess and cleaning up after themselves, but fortunately, with the help of Mendix.”

Mark Bus, ABN AMRO

“Our Mendix platform currently hosts about 150 applications, used in both customer and employee channels, built and maintained by more than 20 different IT teams. We embrace modularity, curated by a central platform team, to speed up the delivery of business value and improve agility at a portfolio level.”

Derryn Zwart, Enexis

“Mendix helps handle complexity by reducing the risk and cognitive strain on the technical side of complexity through visual modeling, reusable components, simplified security, and more. This enables us to focus more on the business side of complexity, turning those variables into value.”

Marcian-Petrut Bondoc-Popescu, Schwarz

“The board game that I would associate the Mendix low-code platform with is chess. Similarly, you have a low number of rules, yet you could build a lot of complexity.”

Understanding->Action

You can’t avoid complexity in software development. And that’s okay! Complexity can mean innovation and the opportunity to differentiate and create value. But it can also mean delays, lack of productivity, and applications that don’t do what they need to.

The good news? Whether you’re looking to get a handle on your portfolio, harness the power of technologies like AI, or so much more, Mendix can help. As a proven leader in low-code, Mendix is uniquely positioned to help you innovate and execute across the entire enterprise.

No matter how you define complexity, the answer is Mendix.