Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
No Silver Bullet
In 1987, Frederick Brooks published an essay describing the major devel-
opments in automatic programming technologies that had occurred over
the past several decades. As an accomplished academic and experienced
industry manager, Brooks was a respected fi gure within the program-
ming community. Using characteristically vivid language, his “No Silver
Bullet: Essence and Accidents of Software Engineering,” refl ected on the
inability of these technologies to bring an end to the ongoing software
crisis:
Of all the monsters that fi ll the nightmares of our folklore, none terrify more
than werewolves, because they transform unexpectedly from the familiar into
horrors. For these, one seeks bullets of silver that can magically lay them to
rest.
The familiar software project, at least as seen by the nontechnical manager,
has something of this character; it is usually innocent and straightforward, but
is capable of becoming a monster of missed schedules, blown budgets, and fl awed
products. So we hear desperate cries for a—silver bullet—something to make
software costs drop as rapidly as computer hardware costs do.
But, as we look to the horizon of a decade hence, we see no silver bullet.
There is no single development, in either technology or in management tech-
nique, that by itself promises even one order-of-magnitude improvement in
productivity, in reliability, in simplicity.
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Brook's article provoked an immediate reaction, both positive and
negative. The object-oriented programming (OOP) advocate Brad Cox
insisted, for example, in his aptly titled “There Is a Silver Bullet,” that
new techniques in OOP promised to bring about “a software industrial
revolution based on reusable and interchangeable parts that will alter
the software universe as surely as the industrial revolution changed
manufacturing.”
55
Whatever they might have believed about the possibil-
ity of such a silver bullet being developed in the future, though, most
programmers and managers agreed that none existed in the present. In
the late 1980s, almost three decades after the fi rst high-level automatic
programming systems were introduced, concern about the software crisis
was greater than ever. The same year that Brooks published his “No
Silver Bullet,” the Department of Defense warned against the real possi-
bility of “software-induced catastrophic failure” disrupting its strategic
weapons systems.
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Two years later, Congress released a report titled
“Bugs in the Program: Problems in Federal Government Computer
Software Development and Regulation,” initiating yet another full-blown
attack on the fundamental causes of the software crisis.
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Ironically, the
