Reference Information:
Title: The Mythical Man-Month
Author: Frederick P. Brooks
Publisher: Addison-Wesley
Summary:
Chapter 16 - No Silver Bullet
No Silver Bullet was a paper written in 1986 about state of programming. He speaks about two major difficulties with software -
- Essential: difficulties that are inherent in the nature of software.
- Accidental: difficulties that attend to production but are not inherent.
The author says that there won't be any major technological or managerial breakthrough that will significantly improve the productivity.
Chapter 17 - "No Silver Bullet" Refired:
The chapter talks about:
- Complexity - there are huge number of states in the software and no two states are alike. As the size of the program increases, the size if the individual parts increases exponentially.
- Conformity - arbitrary set of rules and changes that a software has to undergo.
- Changeability - constant demand for change during the production of the software
- Invisibility - software is conceptual, it can not be visualized like civil and mechanical structures.
In general, the author says that software development is a difficult and solutions just don't pop in the head. Developing code is a time consuming process which demands hard work.
Discussion:
I enjoyed reading these chapters, however, I somewhat disagree with the author when he says that we haven't improved significantly in the past few years. I think we have developed efficient testing software, programming methodologies and other tools that have significantly improved productivity and quality of the code. Better testing and debugging tools have helped us to deliver almost bug-free codes.
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