[No silver bullet]

Every day, the R & D center sees "no silver bullet" on the wall. It knows that some of its basic meanings come from the book "no silver bullet" by the computer scientist Brooks: "There is no pure technological or management improvement that can independently commit to significantly improve the productivity, reliability, and simplicity of the software within 10 years ".

But why can't we greatly improve the software's productivity by "no silver bullet?

In the past, Brooks used an image as an example to describe the "trap" in software engineering-"among all the monsters of terror and folklore, the most terrible thing was the wolf, because they can completely change from familiar faces to terrible monsters, "and" software projects that you are familiar with have the characteristics of some wolves (at least in the eyes of non-technical managers ), something that often seems simple and clear, but may become a monster that lags behind, exceeds the budget, and has a lot of defects ". In the thrilling story, only silver bullets (silver bullets) can be used to eliminate the wolf, while Brooks believes that in software engineering, "there is no silver bullet ", there is no weapon that can curb software variations to "monsters" and greatly improve development efficiency and product quality. "