Fascinating article in this month's Software Development magazine.

We have all worked on projects like this. Nice to have a name for the phenomenon, and to know why they are so difficult to deal with. A couple of good tips on dealing with wicked problems, too.

It's interesting how giving a name to something makes it easier to grasp. Somehow, concepts are more tractable when they have a name.

Patterns are like this. Once you have decided that you need, say, an abstract factory, all of a sudden you know a lot more about your problem than you did before.