For me, the most influential was "Out of the Tar Pit".
From the abstract: "Complexity is the single major difficulty in the successful development
of large-scale software systems. Following Brooks we distinguish
accidental from essential difficulty, but disagree with his premise that
most complexity remaining in contemporary systems is essential."
From the abstract: "Complexity is the single major difficulty in the successful development of large-scale software systems. Following Brooks we distinguish accidental from essential difficulty, but disagree with his premise that most complexity remaining in contemporary systems is essential."
[1] https://github.com/papers-we-love/papers-we-love/blob/master...