Silver Bullets

There is No Silver Bullet - Fred Brooks

Hi, I'm Gigi and this is my first post ever. You can expect some deep essays, sometimes spreading over multiple posts as well as lots of crazy coding and mixing a bunch of technologies. Today, is all about fixing the Software Crisis and eradicating software complexity.

First, let's see what we are up against. Fred Brooks in his mythical Mythical Man-Month book eloquently distinguished between accidental difficulty (complexity that results from bad design, implementation, choice of tools, development processes, etc.) and essential difficulty (complexity which results from how hard is the problem you are trying to solve). He drew the somewhat depressing conclusion that there is no silver bullet (for developing complex software). Even if you manage to remove all the accidental difficulty you still have to deal with the essential difficulty. Since we humans are such discombobulated creatures, we can't expect to develop too fancy software because the essential complexity will bring us to our knees in no time.

Well, I disagree. Humans are not as discombobulated as Fred Brooks claims. They are way way more discombobulated than that and have attention spans that match the half-life of materials with very short half-life. Nowadays, self-respecting introverts are also expected to update their Facebook status every 15 minutes, twit, check-in, follow, like, +1, stumble upon and read a bunch of blogs like you're doing right now.

But, all is not lost. I believe we can still develop great software and not succumb to complexity. You already know the answer: Divide and Conquer. By breaking the system into multiple sub-systems or components that communicate using well-defined protocols you can control the complexity of each component and the complexity of interaction between components. The good news (if you are into job security) is that it's hard. Really really hard. The reason it's so hard is that you have countless ways to screw up everything in every decision you make.

I'll tell you all about it in a series of essays. The short of it is: architecture, processes and automation. Oh, and you need a few good programmers and at least one exceptional programmer.

Finally, is there a silver bullet? No, there isn't. There are many silver bullets and you will have to hit all of them.