The Software Engineering Silver Bullet Conundrum

Authors:
Daniel M. Berry
Affiliations:
University of Waterloo
Venue:
IEEE Software
Year:
2008

Citing 0
Cited 3

Evolutionary sampling and software quality modeling of high-assurance systems

IEEE Transactions on Systems, Man, and Cybernetics, Part A: Systems and Humans
Agile distributed software development: enacting control through media and context

Information Systems Journal
An integrated design flow for the joint generation of control and interfaces from a business model

Computers in Industry

Quantified Score

Hi-index	0.02

Visualization

Abstract

Fred Brooks argued in 1986 that, for various reasons, no software engineering silver bullet would be found in the next decade. I argue now that the main reason that there can be no software engineering silver bullet is that as soon as one is produced, we software engineers move on almost immediately to solve even harder problems for which the silver bullet does not help much. That a silver bullet quickly ceases to be silver is the basic conundrum of software engineering silver bullets.