No Silver Bullet

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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'.

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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.

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