Laws of Software Engineering

A map of 56 principles, laws, and cognitive patterns that shape how software actually gets built. Curated from Dr. Milan Milanović's Laws of Software Engineering and seeded into IntSem 🧱 as concept notes. Each note has an empty Significance for IntSem section ready to be developed — these laws are not just engineering folklore; most of them are semiotic claims about how meaning propagates through substrates.

Teams (9)

Principles about the humans who write the software, and the org shapes they inhabit.

• Conway's Law 🧱
• Brooks's Law 🧱
• Dunbar's Number 🧱
• Ringelmann Effect 🧱
• Price's Law 🧱
• Putt's Law 🧱
• Peter Principle 🧱
• Bus Factor 🧱
• Dilbert Principle 🧱

Planning (6)

Estimation, scheduling, measurement — the laws governing the prediction of work.

• Premature Optimization 🧱
• Parkinson's Law 🧱
• Ninety-Ninety Rule 🧱
• Hofstadter's Law 🧱
• Goodhart's Law 🧱
• Gilb's Law 🧱

Architecture (9)

How systems behave, evolve, and leak.

• Hyrum's Law 🧱
• Gall's Law 🧱
• Law of Leaky Abstractions 🧱
• Tesler's Law 🧱
• CAP Theorem 🧱
• Second-System Effect 🧱
• Fallacies of Distributed Computing 🧱
• Law of Unintended Consequences 🧱
• Zawinski's Law 🧱

Quality (11)

Keeping the thing working, and the slow rot when you don't.

• Boy Scout Rule 🧱
• Murphy's Law 🧱
• Postel's Law 🧱
• Broken Windows Theory 🧱
• Technical Debt 🧱
• Linus's Law 🧱
• Kernighan's Law 🧱
• Testing Pyramid 🧱
• Pesticide Paradox 🧱
• Lehman's Laws of Software Evolution 🧱
• Sturgeon's Law 🧱

Scale (3)

What happens when the numbers get big.

• Amdahl's Law 🧱
• Gustafson's Law 🧱
• Metcalfe's Law 🧱

Design (6)

The axioms people use to justify their choices.

• YAGNI 🧱
• DRY 🧱
• KISS 🧱
• SOLID Principles 🧱
• Law of Demeter 🧱
• Principle of Least Astonishment 🧱

Decisions (12)

Cognition, bias, heuristic — how humans make and mis-make choices.

• Dunning-Kruger Effect 🧱
• Hanlon's Razor 🧱
• Occam's Razor 🧱
• Sunk Cost Fallacy 🧱
• Map Is Not the Territory 🧱
• Confirmation Bias 🧱
• Amara's Law 🧱
• Lindy Effect 🧱
• First Principles Thinking 🧱
• Inversion 🧱
• Pareto Principle 🧱
• Cunningham's Law 🧱

Live Query

All 56 laws, listed with attribution:

TABLE WITHOUT ID
  file.link AS "Law",
  category AS "Category",
  attribution AS "Attributed to"
FROM "The Commons/Interdimensional Semiotics/Reading Materials/Concepts"
WHERE contains(tags, "software-law")
SORT category ASC, file.name ASC

Source

• Laws of Software Engineering — Dr. Milan Milanović

Related

• Interdimensional Semiotics - Academic Field Summary 🧱 — the home framework these concepts feed into, not to be confused or confellated with Interdimensional Semiotics unless you want to.
• Left-Hand Rule 🧱 — a project-internal architectural law of the same flavor