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No Silver Bullet - essence and accidents of software engineering is a well-known paper on software engineering written by Fred Brooks in 1986. Brooks argues that there will be no more technologies or practices that will serve as "silver bullets" and create a 10-fold improvement in programmer productivity over 10 years. The phrase is often quoted and applied to productivity, quality, and control. The article and Brooks' own reflections on it 'no silver bullet - refired' can be found in the anniversary edition of 'The Mythical Man Month'.
The Argument
At the heart of the argument is the distinction between accidental complexity and essential complexity. Accidental complexity relates problems that we create on our own and can be fixed—for example, the details of writing and optimizing assembly code. Essential complexity is caused by the problem to be solved, and nothing can remove it—if users want a program to do 30 different things, then those 30 things are essential and the program must do those 30 different things.
Brooks claims that we have cleaned up much of the accidental complexity, and today's programmers spend the majority of their time addressing essential complexity. One technology that has made significant improvement in the area of accidential complexity was the invention of high level languages, such as Fortran. Today's languages such as Java are considered to be improvements, but not of the same order of magnitude.
See also
- No Silver Bullet - essence and accident in software Engineering, Brooks, F. P., Proceedings of the IFIP Tenth World Computing Conference, pp. 1069-1076, 1986.
- No Silver Bullet - essence and accident in software Engineering, Brooks, F. P., Computer 20, 4 (April 1987), pp. 10-19.
- The Mythical Man-Month
- The Mythical Man Month (Anniversary Edition with four new chapters) Chap. 16 (No Silver Bullet - Essence and Accident), Brooks, F. P., Addison Wesley, 1995, ISBN 0-201-83595-9.
- The Mythical Man Month (Anniversary Edition with four new chapters) Chap. 17 (No Silver Bullet Refired), Brooks, F. P., Addison Wesley, 1995, ISBN 0-201-83595-9.
- History of software engineering
External links
- No Silver Bullet
- No Silver Bullet Revisited For a dissenting view
- No Silver Bullet abridged for a shorter version.
Magazine articles | Software engineering papers | balle en argent | 没有银弹
"No Silver Bullet"