No Silver Bullet Essence and Accidents of Software Engineering

@article{Brooks1987NoSB,
  title={No Silver Bullet Essence and Accidents of Software Engineering},
  author={Frederick P. Brooks},
  journal={Computer},
  year={1987},
  volume={20},
  pages={10-19}
}
  • F. Brooks
  • Published 1 April 1987
  • History
  • Computer
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 technique, that by itself promises even one order-of-magnitude improvement in productivity, in reliability, in simplicity. In this article, I shall try to show why, by examining both the nature of the software problem and the properties of the bullets proposed. 
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3,638 Citations

No silver bullet: a retrospective on the essence and accidents of software engineering
No "Silver Bullet" is a classic software engineering paper that deserves revisiting. What if we had a chance to rewrite Brooks' article today? What have we learned about effective software…
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The author examines the difficulties in solving the generic problem of finding reliable, efficient, timely, and cost-contained solutions for automation problems in software engineering and suggests an executable very-high-level design language which can be used in interactive, incremental, and hierarchical specification of large-scale systems.
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A general library of software components is unlikely to work, because there’s no business model for it, it costs the client too much to understand a component, and components have conflicting world views.
SILVER BULLET OR SILVER DUD ?
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It is asserted that any paradigm that is capable of decomposing a system into large numbers of small components—as frequently occurs in both OO and conventional systems— is fundamentally wrong, and because both paradigms suffer from this flaw, the authors should expect no particular benefits to accrue from an OO system over a non-OO system.
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The high complexity of modern software systems, described more than twenty years ago in the well-know paper by Fred Brooks, has become proverbial amongst practitioners and calls for a fundamental change in understanding and practice of software construction.
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No Silver Bullet - Essence and Accidents of Software Engineering - Response
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