My Commentary Fred Brook’s "No Silver Bullet"

    Silver Bullet The term essential difficulties as it is used by Brooks is complexity, conformity, changeability, and invisible. The complexity is complicated. Increasing the number of moving parts exponential increases the relationships. Software complexity arrives as early as the modeling. Conformity is complicating things Arbitrary. Legal precautions, ideological traditions, and ego-centric bosses create unnecessary work. Changeability is more frequent in software, because it is changing commands in computer memory, far less worldly than changing buildings in a city. Invisibile is the essence of software because it is an abstract that can’t be either “big picture” or detailed. It can’t be either shown in a diagram or watched as a linear story. 

    The term accidental difficulties as it is used by Brooks, is the process of software engineering. Most techniques and tools are for solving the accidents of software engineering. That accidents should account for 90% of the overall effort. Knowing all what the essence of software engineering, it would seem that the production of software is very accident prone. Comforting to see this because I spend 90% of my effort working out avoidable bugs. 

    What Brooks means by a no “silver bullet” is that the software engineers have to be realistic, but at the same time, accept that there is no simple practical solution. His argument is in the essence of software engineering. The vague discipline of software engineering is used to solve half of the immortal problems. That software engineers have to adjust with the nature of it. 

    One opinion that I think is insightful to me is that “each new tool or technique solves some problems while introducing others.” I already knew that new technologies wouldn’t save us time. I didn’t make that connection in programming. Made me wonder about AI making software. 

    One opinion that I don't agree with is conformity, that it is not super oppressive in small business or contracting. In personal projects, especially personal video games, my friend and I make the silliest surprises. I imagine breaking conformity is useful.