No silver bullet

A detailed Summary of No silver bullet


The objectives of this essay are to examine whether or not Brook's original scepticism that "no single new development in the next ten years would give software developers an order-of-magnitude improvement in productivity, reliability, or simplicity" and "...future progress depends upon addressing the data" are reversible. We will discuss Brook's original thoughts and we will try to give alternative solutions (if any). This essay, in general, accepts Brook's thoughts as he worked on OS/360 one of the most known, for their size, software projects.

Before we discuss what Fred Brooks is arguing, we ought to refer to the differences between software engineering and programming. These two concepts are, in fact, totally different. On one hand, programming is primarily a personal activity while on the other hand software engineering is essentially a team activity. In other words, a software engineering team, which is working on a project, may consist of many programmers. On the contrary, a programmer writes a complete program while a software engineer writes a software component that will be combined with components written by other software engineers to build a system. Furthermore, the component on


At this point it would be quite interesting to make a historical background. In the 1950s and early 1960s a program was considered to be satisfactory if it executed and if it was able to give an acceptable answer. We should always bear in mind that the amount of memory that was used by the computers did not give to people the opportunity to run large and complex programs. So, the key in writing a successful program had only to do with the skills of the programmer. As the years were going through, new memory technology was used which allowed larger programs to be executed. Thus, when people decided that the time has come to build complex programs only then they realise how difficult was to monitor large software projects. After this event it became quite clear that as the program size increased the probability of error increased even faster. So the problem of managing large software projects exists even in our days and we are unable to predict when it is going and if it is going to find a solution.



Some common words found in the essay are:
Software Engineering, Moreover Brooks, Fred Brooks, Analysis Software, , software projects, software engineering, Brook's OS/360, software crisis, Word Count, size software, delivered product, silver bullet, inherent nature software, os/360 size software, manage software projects, manage software, complex programs, difficult monitor, fundamental changes, people level knowledge, size software projects,

Approximate Word count = 1730
Approximate Pages = 7 (250 words per page double spaced)

Category: Technology

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