Is this an example of Murphy's law : Suppose that to make a change to the software requires 14 steps.?

Murphy鈥檚 law says that there will be a 鈥渇at controller鈥?obstructing such change. (Possibly mandating that all software changes be done in less than 14 steps). There鈥檚 little prospect of any successful software development occurring in the section. You鈥檙e stuck with the system that existed when you arrived. Murphy鈥檚 law says that this system will have been fouled up beyond all recognition and be unusable.

The law was originally stated as:

"If there's more than one possible outcome of a job or task, and one of those outcomes will result in disaster or an undesirable consequence, then somebody will do it that way."

In essence, it's an engineering principle. No matter how you try to warn people, if it is possible to do something stupid somebody will do something stupid. People stack boxes with "this end up" pointing down all the time. If it were really critical that "this end up" points up, you use a sort of pyramid shape that won't balance properly facing any other direction (of course, pyramids are more awkward than boxes in many ways, so we settle for "this end up".

The principle essentially amounts to "idiot-proof things even if you cannot fathom the idiot that would need it".

It isn't entirely unrelated to quality control, but that's not what it's focussed on either.

I don't think that this is an example of Murphy's law, as such. Murphy's law as it relates to software is a bit unclear, except that in most cases there are a range of possible ways to implement something; often many of those ways have hidden assumptions about the data which may not be justified in all cases; and therefore anything non-trivial that is done will have bugs in it.

In this specific case, I'd say that the most likely application of Murphy's law would be to predict that at least one of those steps will contain an error, and in all probability several of them will. Also, at least one error is likely to make it past testing.

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If you make something idiot proof, they will create a better idiot.

Murphy never understood the law.