No Silver Bullet Essence and Accidents of Software Engineering

This article shall try to show why there is no single development, in either technology or management technique, that by itself promises even one order-of-magnitude improvement in productivity, in reliability, in simplicity.

Abstract

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.