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As we get close to Halloween, it is fitting that we revisit one of the most famous software development articles by Frederick P. Brooks, Jr. titled “No Silver Bullet Essence and Accidents of Software Engineering” published back in 1987. It was an interesting and still relevant metaphor he used about the “werewolves” that can make your projects:
Transform unexpectedly from the familiar into horrors. For these, one seeks bullets of silver that can magically lay them to rest… The familiar software project, at least as seen by the nontechnical manager, has something of this character; it is usually innocent and straightforward, but is capable of becoming a monster of missed schedules, blown budgets, and flawed products. So we hear desperate cries for a silver bullet--something to make software costs drop as rapidly as computer hardware costs do. 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.
If we fast forward nearly 30 years after the article was written (which is equivalent to almost a hundred years in IT years), can we say that we are better off than the time Brooks wrote his article? Wasn’t Agile thought of (or often marketed) as the “silver bullet” that will wipe away all those software project werewolves?
I think we’ve made a lot of progress since then and Agile has been a great framework and method, but my honest opinion is that it is in no way a silver bullet and to be fair it was never created to be such. But like a lot of things that gets created to solve a problem and achieves a high level of success, people in their excitement with the results over hype it, with the evangelist and disciples trying to apply it everywhere and inappropriately.
But the most enlightening part of the article was section related to “the development of approaches and tools for rapid prototyping of systems as prototyping is part of the iterative specification of requirements.” This basically is the core tenant of Agile and Brooks takes it further by advocating software that grows organically, for “each added function and new provision for more complex data or circumstances grows organically out of what is already there.”
By using this ingenious metaphor, it makes us view software not just as some static system but one that grows organically which entails the need for nurturing and the right environment to promote and encourage that growth.
I couldn’t think of a better way to describe the Agile process then this article that was written well before Agile as we know it came into being.
Posted on: October 16, 2013 12:27 PM |
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