Talk:No Silver Bullet
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No need to paste the ENTIRE "No Silver Bullet" article here! I deleted it as it takes up space unnecessarily and, besides, it is linked in the references section of the Wikipedia article. We need this space to discuss the actual Wikipedia article. Thanks. 82.43.195.131 15:55, 16 October 2006 (UTC)
I don't think the edits of 86.139.127.180 are in good faith. Example: "As frustrating as this may be, he is most probably right. Most of us are blub programmers." 69.156.156.191 21:17, 5 February 2007 (UTC)
I think this interpretation is wrong: "It should be noted that Brooks states that this limitation to programmer productivity only applies to essential complexity and he advocated challenges to accidental complexity which he believes can lead to significant (perhaps greater than 10 fold in a 10 year period) improvements." I think brooks says that accidental (which is not meant as "by accident", but as "self made by developers") complexity was almost eliminated in the last few years (he makes this clear in the 1995 edition of the The Mythical Man-Month), but still there is no technique insight to improve the productivity of a software team by an order of magnitude it 10 years because we cannot tackle the essential complexity of the problems to be solved. Oderbolz 10:29, 14 October 2007 (UTC)
[edit] Critics
What about putting some information on critics of the article? Like this one: Why Software Is Bad and What We Can Do to Fix It
I think this article shows well that Brooks paper is misunderstood by many. When Savain writes "No other paper in the annals of software engineering has had a more detrimental effect on humanity's efforts to find a solution to the software reliability crisis. Almost single-handedly, it succeeded in convincing the entire software development community that there is no hope in trying to find a solution." he fails to see that brooks writes from an optimistic position. Brooks admits that IT has seen a 6 order of magnitude improvement in performance, but he essentially says that the human problem will remain, no matter what technology we use. Also Savain says: " When Brooks wrote his famous paper, he apparently did not realize that his arguments applied only to algorithmic complexity." Brooks does not speak about a specific way to write software, his argument is valid for algorithmic or other software. For me, the most important part of brooks article is this: "I believe the hard part of building software to be the specification, design, and testing of this conceptual construct, not the labor of representing it and testing the fidelity of the representation. We still make syntax errors, to be sure; but they are fuzz compared with the conceptual errors in most systems." The problem is not a technical one (as Weinberg puts it: its always a people problem). Our rules and laws, our processes are complex, that is why it is hard to model them correctly. —Preceding unsigned comment added by Oderbolz (talk • contribs) 10:49, 14 October 2007 (UTC)
[edit] Dubious
The "abridged" version of the "No Silver Bullet" article differs in more ways than length from other versions on the web. It makes some assertions that aren't in the others, and removes some text that would tend to contradict the new assertions. Finally, it appears to support notions about micropayment software licensing schemes that the author of the abridgement would personally profit from, and which were unlikely to have been considered seriously by the real Fred P. Brooks. I vote that it be removed or permanently marked as propagandized. 24.165.61.213 (talk) 08:08, 26 December 2007 (UTC)
