Review on No Silver Bullet By Adil Khan

The article “No Silver Bullet” was written by Frederick P. Brooks, Jr in 1986.

The main statement he gave is “There is no single development, in either technology or management technique, which by itself promises even one order-of-magnitude improvement within a decade in productivity, in reliability, in simplicity”.

As a lot of problems were faced like failure of many software oriented systems. These failures were just because of improper way used to deal specially with essential task like problem definition, information gathering or requirements gathering etc.  

Brooks proposed that there should be a proper discipline for development of software to avoid such kind of problems as mentioned above. As software development is something different than the other development fields like electrical and mechanical etc.

Brooks described the software on the bases of the following features:

1. Invisibility

Software is invisible and it have no physical existence. Software exist logically and it is unable to see the software from an eye unlike any other object. Software engineers tend to just build a piece of software without having a clear idea of how the final product would look or perform since there is no way to visualize it before development, which is why there is a need for a prototype to lay out the major functions of the software that seem impossible to complete

1. Changeability

As to everything in the world, software also has a lifetime. There comes a point in a software's life-cycle where the functions and capabilities of a software need to change or improve. As needs of people and requirements for the software changes time to time and it demands more improvements and updates in the software.

1. Conformity

Every software, ever developed has to run on different systems. There may be some other software on the system. That our software have to run accurately in the presence of other software without being infected by them. This makes it more difficult for software to perform the way it was built to perform because sometimes it does not fit-in with older systems

1. Complexity

The software engineering field in itself is growing, young minds are coming up with more complex programming languages to solve real life issues as our needs increase day by day and we want more assistance and reliability in our tasks. All these facts maximize the complexity of software.

            On the bases of above mentioned properties of the software, Brooks tried to realize that software engineering should be a particular branch of computer science to deal with software crises and it will give us a proper systematic way to develop a software.

            I think that all the facts and reasons provide by Brooks to adopt the software development as a proper discipline are valid and there was need for a proper and systematic way for software development. All the essential task and management become easy and software productivity enhanced today as compared to the past. I am not asking that the software nowadays are defect free but they have more accuracy and compatibility. Errors and defects are minimized.

By Adil Khan