[forth_fool]

I got curious about the fact that the cited table from the paper only contains five laws, but the blog author describes seven such laws. So I read the paper. I have to say that the blog describes these laws superficially at best. I recommend reading the paper (instead of the blog post)! It's not too surprising (the results have long been digested into common knowledge since its publication, I guess) but anyway draws attention to the fundamental relationship between software complexity, program lifecycle, and the organization in which the software lives.

The first and second laws are more or less accurately described in the blog post.

The blog post reflects the third law as "... software development is an ongoing process that requires continual improvement and adapation." This does not match the description in the paper, where the third law is described such that over time, the system behaviour emerges from a (large) number of single decisions within a complex environment.

The fourth law is described by the blog post to be about feedback loops (which would be actually applicable to the third law). In the paper, it is about stability (no radical changes during a program's evolution).

The fifth law is described to be about incremental and radical changes, while the paper refers to quite the opposite. Organizations want to maintain familiarity, so the tend to reject big changes.

The sixth law in the blog post seems to refer to the actual fourth and/or fifth in the paper.

And the seventh law just seems to be made up.

[svilen_dobrev]

seems there is another paper? 8 laws in wikipedia..

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lehman%27s_laws_of_software_ev...

[lovemenot]

The final law is that the Laws themselves must evolve.