I find a lot of parallels between this article on ‘The Role of Simplicity in Writing’ and the role of simplicity in software.

A developer’s source code will inevitibly be read by someone else. That’s why people realize the importance of code reviews. If your source code is complex, then people can’t read it, so they are more likely to want to rewrite it than maintain it.

When I’ve worked in XP environments, it was nice because through pair-programming, collaborative code ownership, refactoring, and TDD, we created code that was simple and that the entire team could understand. We couldn’t really tell who wrote what code in the end. It all looked the same and it was mostly simple.