No silver bullet

Abstract 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. Introduction 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, th

Most of the projects, including software projects, are usually running out of time, the budget limit is much higher than it was prearranged and also the delivered product is not remarkable. Brooks made the same point when he argued that technology would not provide a silver bullet for the software crisis within the foreseeable future. "Brooke"tms scepticism was based on the complexity and other inherent qualities of software, and on his perception that upcoming advances, such as object-oriented programming, time-sharing, automatic programming, graphical programming and artificial intelligence, would yield only marginal improvements. Another advantage is that the problem area can be easily located as being probably in the segment just added. This means that the cost for either updating or building new software will be quite high. But it has not provided, and seems increasingly unlikely to do so, a fundamental solution to the software crisis. Brooks by using his own experience on large projects argues that the goals of Software engineering are: Firstly, to produce quality software, secondly with low cost and lastly to produce the deliver product on time. Software is very difficult to produce for a lot of reasons. AnalysisSoftware engineering technology was born when we realised that we were not capable of managing large software projects. ConclusionTo sum up, we ought to accept that no silver bullet is possible to be found in the near future. Firstly, we always have a working system even if it is limited or even if it is not exactly what we would like to have but of course it is better from nothing. Nevertheless, the problem is even bigger if we consider that the size of software systems being created has increased. One technique that is suggested by Brookes has to do with addressing the "essence"tm but this is not the only one. So, we should always look for those programmers that correspond to the needs of the particular project that we are going to build.