The Whiz of Silver Bullets

ChelleChelle writes "In an entertaining yet well thought-out article, software architect Alex E. Bell of The Boeing Company lashes out at the so-called 'Silver Bullets' and those who rely on them to solve all their software development difficulties. From the article: 'the desperate, the pressured, and the ignorant are among those who continue to worship the silver-bullet gods and plead for continuance of silver-fueled delusions that are keeping many of their projects alive.'"

The Real Silver Bullet

Microsoft Vista! It's the silver bullet for everyone! Where do you want to go today? TM

Bullets?

Seeing as how TFA mainly rants about XML (and only passingly mentions past "silver bullets" of the past), he should be complaining about the silver bullet.

I prefer my analogies in car or tube form, thank you very much.

Re:Bullets?

XML works? Huh?

XML is a data representation. It works? How does it work? By representing data?

What else could work? S-Expressions? SGML? ASN.1? Flat text file?

The data representation isn't solving the problem.

XML, Extreme Programming, technique / technology of the week all are trying to do the same thing: help us manage complexity. Fred Brooks had a lot to say there. My favorite quote from the 'No Silver Bullet' essay:

Software entities are more complex for their size than perhaps any other human construct because no two parts are alike (at least above the statement level). If they are, we make the two similar parts into a subroutine--open or closed. In this respect, software systems differ profoundly from computers, buildings, or automobiles, where repeated elements abound.

Re:Bullets?

XML works by freeing you from the need to come up with your own format and a parser. So, flat files, for example. Most people use completely braindead formats for flat files, like each data item on a line with no indication of what it might be, reinventing .INI files, or the even less complicated key/value approach.

That works, until you notice that it's not as easy as it seems. How do you represent arrays of data, or trees? Can you specify a string in Russian and have the parser not choke on it? What about Chinese? Can it handle Unicode? What if your format is "key=value", and the value contains a "=" or a newline? Can the key contain spaces? If you write "key = value", do the spaces get stripped or not? What if the first character of the value is a space?

I've seen all sorts of horrible tricks to deal with those problems, like "key=value" where the value is encoded in hex or base64.

XML is nice for that: The designers thought of all that already, designed it to be able to deal with all of them, and made parsers that work.

Re:Bullets?

I think you've essentially hit the nail on the head there. XML is excellent at what it does. However what it does is not "everything", and the "silver bullet" marketing (Java + XML = "Enterprise"!) surrounding it causes people to get upset, because that's not what it is.

Marketing is, in general, really good at turning people against perfectly good technologies, because those in the know will always see through the lies, exaggerations and half-truths, but will then have a hard time conveying these to superiors or other colleagues who have had a little less experience and a glossy leaflet to gaze on.

Re:Bullets?

Some time ago when SOA where the very new buzword, I've had an interview where the manager of the team asked me why I didn't put XML in big bold character in my resume next to Java, C++, ...

For him, XML was sort of a religion. The ultimate "technology" (we were not talking about all the technos that comes with XML like XSLT, ..., just the plain XML) that allowed the world to see the light and embrace SOA/MDA design, the only god that can save our wicked developer soul. The whole interview was about my relationship with the XML and how its light shines upon me.

Talking about XML as a "tool" was a blasphemy. I "learned" that the savior XML:
- Saved us from the interoperability problem by allowing us to transfer data from and to any system
    transparently. Sure, you only have to transform the output of one application into the input of the second system.
- Reduce coding problem ( using for example, the function "XML DoSomething(XML params)", so you can change the params without changing the interface and the doc (duh!) )
- Reduce database problem ( storing XML as blob in the DB - no need to call the DBA when you change the data format )
- Solve configuration problem ( now configuration file are in XML that means it is easy to understand )

Thanks XML.

Re:Bullets?

If one codes in a way he's personally comfortable with, he can get the job done even if it involves a not globally ideal technology like XML, but when working methods are pushed down by above with no consideration for individual needs, that's dangerous.

Within reason, of course. If your code looks like this:

if( yes->strong )
yes->weak->run(fast);
b = when->walrus();
b.helloWorld();
delete b;

And it's suppose to be a generic method to manage mouse-clicks, the manager has some cause for complaint (and the rest of the team are likely looking to murder you the next time you nod off at your desk).

Silver Bullet in a Concealed-Carry Revolver

Consider the following scenario. You have told your boss, in total honesty, that your software code will need 8 weeks to complete. Your boss cuts your time to only 4 weeks and then pressures you by hinting that he may fire you if you do not comply with the new accelerated schedule.

In this case, if you under 18 years of age, I recommend that you buy a box of silver bullets or just plain vanilla lead bullets. Put the bullets into your revolver. Hide the revolver in your jacket. Then, walk into your boss' office. Fire away. You will not be tried as an adult since you are not a legal adult. Better yet, after you reach the age of 18, your criminal record will be wiped clean.

If you are over 18 years of age, you need to weigh the situation carefully. If you kill your boss, then you will definitely be tried for 1st degree murder. You may be eligible to submit a plea of insanity. Most states allow such a plea. Check with your lawyer before you start shooting.

Well...

If Vendors would stop preaching that they are the next 'silver-bullet' then perhaps this would stop. It is not the techs who decides what comes in and what goes out. It is normally driven by cost. And when companies say they can do all of X,Y, and Z at a lower cost then any competitor, the IT department gets screwed, and management looks at them with wonder because they provided a 'silver-bullet' solution to them.

Re:Well...

If Vendors would stop preaching that they are the next 'silver-bullet' then perhaps this would stop.

This sentence might be true, but is meaningless. Vendors will do whatever sells. Period.

It is not the techs who decides what comes in and what goes out. It is normally driven by cost.

And this is what has to change. Saying that techs should make all the decisions is of course unrealistic, but in a sane company the management lets them evaluate the solutions before deciding.

Re:Well...

Saying that techs should make all the decisions is of course unrealistic, but in a sane company the management lets them evaluate the solutions before deciding.

Why ? Think about it from the management's point of view. The choices they face are:

1. Listen to the your tech department and make a decision based on their (hopefully realistic) estimate. The company continues steadily onward and you get fired since you didn't manage to improve it, and therefore the stock doesn't rise enough to meet the stockholder's demands.
2. Listen to claims you know full well are sweet lies and make estimates based on them. The company gets a hopelessly overoptimistic estimate on its future fortunes, the stock price goes up, and you get a fat bonus. When the lie is found out, you can claim that you were lied to and can't be blamed for anything.

Which one should a sane manager choose ? Getting fired or getting a bonus ?

Here around

it is RUP, ITIL. Now everybody in the management swear by those. Naturally softwaer engineer are forced to draw nice UML diagram before those are sent in gigantic 98 pages document to the otusourcing team, for a change which should have taken at most 20 hours we get weeks of works. I would accept it if this was linked to an increase of quality of code, less bugs, and lower end cost. But this is not. Still this has been declared a success by our management.

Stop the BLAME GAME!

I will admit that people like to find silver bullets. BUT, and this is where I get annoyed. It is not just management that preaches silver bullets! How about those that preach Open Source will solve all problems? Or how about Ruby? What about Perl, Java, Linux? And we get annoyed when people don't listen to our "silver bullets."

The problem here is that everybody has their own silver bullets, and if you don't happen agree then you think the other person is a bone head.

So let's stop the blame game shall we.

Re:Stop the BLAME GAME!

I thinks most engineers are smart enough to understand there is no single solution to every problem. They may have biasses, but most damn well know that there are problems for which the other solution is best. What you are talking about is a vocal minority of zealots versus a very large majority that can't be bothered to deal with them. The problem is that, typically, engineers are the silent majority and managers are the vocal minority.

Re:Stop the BLAME GAME!

How about those that preach Open Source will solve all problems? Or how about Ruby? What about Perl, Java, Linux?

I agree with you 100%. Those people are just wrong-headed and can't be reasoned with. It's Python that accelerates software development.

Re:Stop the BLAME GAME!

It's Python that accelerates software development.

In our shop, it's Java that accelerates software development, and I don't mean the programming language.

UML and managers

Overheard while doing an internship at Logica CMG [logicacmg.com]:

Manager: "This new project should be done with new project management methods, like UML"
Senior: "Uuh, you do know that UML is a notation for diagrams?"
Manager (irritated): "Yeah, of course I know that. You know what I mean!"

Sorry, no sale :p

As opposed to China or India, however, my outsourcing plan would focus on a small town in Romania - for it is only in Transylvania where the werewolf can be hired to work with an unrivaled vigilance to avoid the whiz of silver bullets.

Sorry, I LIVE in a pretty small town in Transylvania (used to live in a slightly larger one), and software developers around here are all BUT immune to (the lure of such) silver bullets... ever heard of Cluj-Napoca or Baia Mare (or any of the software microbehemoths that start springing to life there) ?

Silver Bullets works just fine

There is abselutely no problem sticking to your silver bullet.... Instead of choosing the right tool for the task, choose the right task for the tool. This also ensures you don't waste your time with web development as there is no tool that is right for web development, just tools that suck slightly less than the others. :)

Re:Silver Bullets works just fine

All web development sucks if you consider the fact that ultimately HTML gets involved. Toss in CGI and/or Flash and you might as well just kill yourself now and get it over with.

Bullets don't kill people...

... - As the saying goes.

The problem with Silver Bullets is not the bullet itself - but the idiot behind the trigger.

Most of these Silver Bullets are great ideas, but give them to some moron who half knows how they work (and yet claims to be an expert) and they do the exact opposite of what they were intended to do, and because some PHB reads about in the industry pages, they just keep hanging in there like a millstone around our respective necks.

For any technology you can see outstanding implementations. But for every one of those there are ten other complete disasters.

And as the other saying goes - if you don't know who the moron is.....

Untried bullets

An interesting article but one should be wary of dismissing a silver bullet on the basis of poor application.

My own experience of some of these bullets (UML, agile methods, etc.) within an organisation is that they get a small enthusiastic following who push it so far, implement maybe 20% of the technique then lose interest or regress under deadline pressure. They don't follow the bullet far enough to draw proper conclusions.

I'm cynical about most bullets, but some catch the imagination. I'd just like to see one of them, just once, properly implemented.

Incidentally, this isn't just an engineering article. Management suffers from the same tendency towards managerial silver bullets (and the same poor application). I guess many professions do.

Webservices are todays silver bullets

XML as the simple thing it is, works perfectly.
And every body knows that XML itself is no longer a silver bullet. It is too natural and integrated to not use XML where it fits in.

What I worry about is the huge stack of technologies that are currently being built on top of it.

Webservices being the biggest of those and worse the stuff that goes on top of that:
XML Schemas, WS-YouNameIt, BPMN, BPEL4WS

It reminds me of a few years ago when choosing java for an enterprise project meant that you had to use EVERY component in the J2EE stack, so that every single class was a EJB and every single call was a remote call.

Now most projects has learnt to stay away from the "classic J2EE" approach, but are instead falling for the next silver bullet which invites to make the excact same mistake using Web Services

Webservices are great and has their uses, but I have seen projects that subscribe to the idea that every single component in the project should be a webservice and orchestrated by BPEL. Good luck.

Re:Webservices are todays silver bullets

I wouldn't say XML is a silver bullet, but the act of forcing you to structure your data and use extremely robust libs to read / write it sure has its benefits. I wish in fact that all apps read and wrote their configs through common libs. Something akin to PAM, but for config files would be an enormous benefit to Linux where every app and its uncle seems to use a different format.

Web services are probably being overtouted as a silver bullet, but the fact is that they serve a very useful purpose. I maintain a legacy app which uses ad-hoc XML over HTTPS. Since I have no idea what the format of the request and response is, I must constantly refer to the code to figure it out. I must also invent my own error responses if the format is incorrect. Web services mean I could just define the interface in WSDL (using WTP in Eclipse for example) and more or less forget about it. I can even use Axis or .NET's wsdl.exe to auto generate the stubs that make the call and just concentrate on the business logic. Bad calls throw a soap fault which is turned into an exception or whatnot by the client lib that makes the call. It doesn't make all my problems disappear, but it does mean I can be looking at the functionality of the app rather than wasting time rolling my own XML format.

And even the ad-hoc XML over HTTPS is quite an improvement over what came before. Then you'd be talking about opening a port and defining the whole handshake and transfer of data using messages, complete with all the bugs and security issues that go with that. Standards are a great thing even if they initially seem confusing.

Certainly any standard is open to abuse. I expect that anyone who has to deal with Microsoft's new Office format over XML will be in a world of hurt. But you have Microsoft to blame for that, not the standard.

There is always a meta-layer

Don't blame inappropriate, blind, forcing of new methods and tools upon developers by ignorant, parroting managers on that methods and tools - those are someone's successfully deployed solutions which didn't work elsewhere, as they could had been expected not to.

The simple rule of the thumb is (Oh, no, another silver bullet incoming): listen to the needs of your "troops from the trenches", your developers. Each innovation begins with someone's "scratching own itch". If your developers don't feel the same itch as the inventor of the new method/tool, then they will certainly suffer under the scratch devised and produce net worse results.

Managers should be evaluated not based on total of changes ("improvements") they did but on the difference between the damage they did when they acted without real need and gain they made when their actions where appropriate. Beeing frantic is not desirable feat for a leader. We don't need CYA excuses ("Don't fire me, I worked hard, I am up to date, I introduced all this new buzzword-named things I found on Internet") but responsibility, insight, competence, awareness. It shouldn't be easy-wheasely cakewak beeing a manager and following the path of "blame others" as it seems to be today.

Why 'silver bullets'?

So, what's a 'silver bullet' supposed to be good for? Killing werewolves, right? (Or wererats or warehouses or werecanaries.)

Given that it's really only good for one extremely limited function, why in the world does a 'silver bullet' represent a solution to a wide range of problems?

TFA is shallow hogwash

Oh, so buzzwords can be used to disguise laziness and bad implementation? Where's the news? Even in his satire of XML (and don't you think I'm a big XML fan) he shows that he doesn't understand.

For one: 'utterance_in_a_state_of_speechlessness' should be 'utterance state="speechlessness"'

And further: Using sophisticated design techniques doesn't replace the work, but it can help a piece of software reach it's maximum potential. On the inside of every shop there is a silver bullet: It's called education. A model doesn't replace programming and somewhere beyond the ususal CRUD there's allways work to be done on procedural details - that's where part of the fun in sw developement is. Every developer worth his money knows this. If he where ranting at academics, I'd understand, but as far as I'm conserned he's preaching to the choir.

TFA is definitely not 'well-thought-out'. In fact it's a tad pointless.

Fred Brooks original silver bullet paper

Fred Brooks original silver bullet paper [berkeley.edu]

*sigh*

I am currently involved in a lot of remediation of silver bullet stuff. Don't get me wrong. I love XML, get a lot of milage out of using UML to drive MDA tools, am an advocate of publishing web services etc. The problem is, so much of it is done in an ass hatted way. And then I get called in, late in the project, to tell folks exactly how screwed they are.

The root problem is people using tools they never bother to even vaguely understand. If you aren't going to bother to understand the technology, please don't use it. Please, I'm begging you, you'll just screw it up. Or at the very least, find someone who *does* understand the tech to advise you.

Technoluddite?

Apart and aside from the fact he sees little or no value in things like objects or IDEs, he writes in an inpenetrable victorian style. It's either fine satire skewering the irony of luddite technologists, or the poor guy just doesn't have a clue how laughable his essay was.

As he snarkily pooh-pooh's the distribution of realtime stock and financial data as a web service, it's probably the latter. I used to work for a company who ran their own ticker plant and had software on the desks of almost every stock broker, investment banker and forex trader on the planet. The client/server requirments of the system were immense. The client had to be maintained on Windows, Sun, Mac and was being slooooowly ported to linux, was fragile as hell and a pain to install and upgrade. The server was a farm of eight midrange Sun or AS/400 boxes, fed by redundant T1's from the ticker plant, and this would only accomodate two or three hundred users.

Then we went to a web-based client, sort of like AJAX before people started calling it AJAX, and all the headache went away. It's not a small or trivial thing, and it radically changed the way business was done, and for the better.

Just because it's new and has a buzzword doesn't mean it's a flash in the pan. The moral of the story is to use your judgement, and avoid formulas. Even tried-and-true ones. Silver bullets may not exist, but technology doesn't stand still, no matter how many hours you've sunk into learning emacs and gdb.

SoupIsGood Food

Re:Technoluddite?

Apart and aside from the fact he sees little or no value in things like objects or IDEs

How did "objects and IDEs don't solve every problem" turn into "objects and IDEs have little or no value"?

Hmmm.

Either you know what you are doing - or not.

Software development is a pathological case

There can be few examples of an advanced industrial activity in which the ultimate decision-makers know so little about the technology involved, and have so little respect for the opinions of those who do.

"Hope springs eternal in the human breast" - indeed, in business (and especially sales) optimism is highly thought of, and realism often denounced as "cynicism" or "negative thinking". This is all very well in activities involving human beings, who can easily be manipulated through their emotions. However, it fails utterly when confronted with the cold, hard facts of the physical world.

When someone seems to be unrealistically hopeful, we speak of "getting a reality check". In other words, finding our noses hard up against the brick wall of ineluctable, unarguable facts. The problem with most software development projects is that the ultimate decision-makers - those who have the gold and, therefore, make the rules - are very rarely able to get a reality check until the project runs out of time, money, or both. They are hopelessly ill-equipped to make reasoned, educated judgments based on the arguments presented by vendors, analysts, and their own technical staff. So it's hardly surprising that over-optimism tends to creep in.

I have been giving talks about software engineering for about 20 years now, and I usually stress the fact that "there are no silver bullets". This warning is always greeted by vigorous nodding, knowledgeable smiles, and sometimes applause. Afterwards, I sadly feel, the people who have just agreed that there are no silver bullets go out into the exhibition hall or open their magazines, and resume... looking for silver bullets.

Ultimately, I see just two ways out of this dead end. Either decision-makers take the time, trouble, and mental effort to learn the necessary basics about software development and maintenance. Or they start choosing technical managers and architects who really know their stuff - and trust them implicitly. As time goes by, I hope that both these things will happen more and more.

references but not links?

I know this is nitpicking but how can one have an article that uses superscripts for references but not links?

Do I fault the author or the publisher?

Sound analogy

If we equate "Manager who buys into this crap" with the werewolf, and watch as said manager's project(s) fail miserably, in the end, the silver bullet has/will effectively done/do its job.

I've been in the business for nigh on 1/4 century

I've seen programming paradigms come and go (structured programming). I've seen management techniques come and ago (PERT charts). I've seen technologies that had gone come back again (virtual machines) and even some that have gone come back (centralized computing services). If punch cards come back, I'm retiring to my cave.

There is one thing that seems constant: The mix of successful, marginally successful, and just plain failed projects feels the same as ever, even though I'm positively sure that our knowledge of how to create software is much greater than it was.

The glass half full aspect of this of course is that the sytems we are developing are far more powerful and complex than what we worked on in the early 80s. Back then many projects were just collections of utility programs that were invoked from the OS command line and ran top to bottom. Structure those programs, and the problem of how to create software is solved, see??? That's why structured programming was the silver bullet of the 70s and early 80s.

Now, it's not uncommon for a "lowly" application programmer to have to deal with things like aynchronous processes, something that was the province of the lordly systems programmer back in the day. Ordinary applicaitons are as or more complex today than major systems were back then.

The other thing that is constant is that some people get it, some sort of get it, and some don't get it a all. But the common shibboleths of our profession are freely available to all, level of englightment not withstanding. The difference is the lower the level of enlightenment, the more those things take on the role of totems and fetishes.

I've been looking at jobs listings recently, and curiously they never seem to be looking for charactersistics that would demonstrate that somebody "gets it". I've seen things like "Must have three to five years of programming with Struts." Now I have nothing against Struts, but I can see nothing about Struts that would indicate you need three years of hard labor to be able to work productively with it. After all, the point of all these frameworks is to make things easier. I can see "must have thre years working with distributed transactional systems", or "must have three years of experience with security on web applications", or "must have three years of experience with designing user interfaces."

I'd rather call things like the XML or web services craze "technology fetishes" than "silver bullets". A fetish is "An object that is believed to have magical or spiritual powers, especially such an object associated with animistic or shamanistic religious practices." Religious or technological, fetishes are for some aids on a difficult but rewarding journey, for others they're the promise of relief from hard work, thinking and risk.

Re:I've been in the business for nigh on 1/4 centu

TQM, it seems teaches constant positive feedback.

Actually, I remember the TQM craze well. However instead of learning about it from the trade rags, I decided to read Kaoru Ishikawa's book, "What Is Total Quality Control?: The Japanese Way". Dr. Ishikawa is the creator of the infamous "fish-bone" diagram.

The interesting thing about Ishikawa's book is that if you had to boil it down, it wasn't about tricks that would magically give your products "quality". Oh, there are some chapters on how to understand what customers' real requirements are (thus the fishbone diagram). But they aren't the heart of the book.

What the book really is, is a primer on character. And according to the book the bedrock characteristic of a quality producing organization is integrity.

It does no good to understand customer requirements if you don't understand your own products and processes; and you will never understand those if you fear the truth and you discourage its spread. So the first thing you need to do is eliminate the culture of fear: fear of failure,mistakes, and plain old bad news. Once fear is eliminated from the organization, useful information begins to flow. In Ishikawa's vision of the quality organiation, fear of the truth is the greatest enemy: victory in competition goes to the organization that discovers and rectifies its faults the quickest.

Which is why it is foolish to motivate with praise, particularly undeserved praise. I've never met an engineer worth his salt who really enjoys getting personal praise on more than a occasional basis. The good ones are more motivated with the prospect of becoming better. Praise has its uses; mainly to help maintain a realistically balanced view in the painful process of self improvement.

Manufacturing is different than software development. But it is true that the integrity and fear play a huge part in determining software quality. Some day I will write a book: Why Good Engineers Write Bad Software. The number one reason has to be this: not facing reality. This leads to the number two reason: not doing what you know you should be doing.

Both of these proceed from fear. A software development organization that eliminates fear eliminates the number one barrier to achieving its potential. In the end, the personal qualities of courage, compassion, and integrity that we bring to our work matter much more than any methodology.

Re:I've been in the business for nigh on 1/4 centu

Structured programming is gone? I hadn't noticed.

It is no longer a fetish.

How exactly would you phrase that in a job listing? "Only people who 'get it' need apply"? Determining whether somebody does in fact "get it" is clearly best left for interview.

For examples, see my original posting. Let me give you an example of why the way job listing are usually written are broken.

Suppose you use WebWork in your application. So you say, "Must have three years of experience with WebWork". Now you have three engineers. Engineer A has worked on a WebWork based application for three years, although he has mostly been coding business logic POJOs. Engineer B has five years of Struts experience, and in the last six months has converted an application from Struts to WebWorks in anticipation of WebWork becoming Struts 2. Engineer C has been programming Java MVC applications for the web for ten years. He lead the development of an in house MVC framework in 1998, and has periodically done evaluations of Struts and WebWork, but neither has enough of and advantage to convert from the in house framework.

Under the criteria you have the job, only the least qualified candidate is going to get an interview.

Splendid stuff!

Reading this article has instantly solved all of my project management problems!

Silver bullet effect

When you find a silver bullet, you usually end up shooting yourself in the foot.

It's People

The only true Silver Bullet is really smart people. I've seen it time and again. If a project absolutely positively has to get finished by a particular date, put the best people in your organization on the project and turn them loose. Even the mediocre people on the team will start performing well above their normal levels. I'm not saying that adding new tools and technology won't help. I'm saying that adding really smart people will do far more than tools and technology.

Silver Bullet Response Template

$BULLET won't help you if your programmers are retarded.

If that doesn't work move on to:

$BULLET won't help you BECAUSE your programmers are retarded.

If that still doesn't have any effect...

$BULLET won't help you because your managers are retarded.

For BULLET in "Structured programming techinques" "Top down design" "Bottom up design" "Object oriented programming" C++ java XML "six sigma" "agile (or extreme) programming" scrum

The old saying

When all you have are silver bullets, all problems look like a werewolf.

Alternatives to silver bullets

Other things to try are

1) Stake thru the heart
2) Garlic worn around the neck
3) Holy water
4) Crucifix
5) Sunlight

Tagging Beta

I tagged this story 'werewolf' :)

Two unspoken words: agile and extreme

I enjoyed the snarky and smart tone of the article. And I largely agreed with everything he said. However, I implied from his remarks (and comments here) that he could count the Xtreme Programming and agile methods among the false promises of the silver bullet. And I have heard them referred to by people I trust as silver bullets.

Before we start a religious war on whether XP/agile are silver bullets or not, let's step back and ask whether we're talking about different things. I think there is no silver bullet that will kill a software monster created by Big Up Front Design (BUFD).

It's a good thing to put serious, deep thought into what must be done before one starts work. You have to do your homework and you have to write down everything you know for certain up front. Trouble happens because after some point up-front design becomes mere speculation. You have to somehow confirm early design decisions made when you're ignorant.

In the old days before computers, Engineers built prototypes to do that. Nowadays, Engineeers (or the pointy-haired bosses who lead them) are addicted to the notion of "shipping the prototype."

I personally favor the notion of capturing "user stories" because stories have a way of separating "what" from "how" and stories are an effective way to communicate pertinent details between customer and developer while skipping over one's ignorance.

A trouble with BUFD is that it becomes a "proclamation" about software from the developer (or customer, depending upon the power-relationship). If we were gods, that would not be a problem, but we have limited knowledge and we have sort our our ignorance. But we're not and I think a "conversation" between the two is a more effective way to sort out what's wanted and what's possible.

In a "conversation" the software monster never grows so big that the ammunition in our clip (UML, agile/xp methods, high-level languages, today's microsoft buzzword) can't kill it.

"the" silver bullet in IE

position: relative;

Use it in every element, it is the silver bullet to fix every CSS bug that IE contains.

Inability to deal with complexity

For a couple of years now, i've been entertaining the theory that a great many people in IT (especially managers) have trouble dealing with tradeoffs, side-effects and feedback loops whenever a choice has to be made on how the development process is to be setup/changed. The longer the chain of side-effects, the more complicated the feedback-loops or the less self-explanatory/measurable the tradeoffs, side-effects or feedback-loops are, the more likelly they will be ignored or not understood.

Hence the common practice (in some countries) of selling impossible deadlines to customers and then using overwork to (try and) achieve those deadlines, when, via the "tired developers make more bugs" and the "low morale" negative feedback loops, overwork usually leads to LONGER development times and a long tail of bugfixing after release but before the software is accepted for production.

The same theory could also explain the recurring reliance by some managers on the next "silver bullet" to solve all their problems - silver bullets are always sold as solving everything and having no downsides (thus no tradeoffs) and no side-effects (and thus no negative feedback loops).

Inability to deal with complexity

For a couple of years now, i've been entertaining the theory that a great many people in IT (especially managers) have trouble dealing with tradeoffs, side-effects and feedback loops whenever a choice has to be made on how the development process is to be setup/changed. The longer the chain of side-effects, the more complicated the feedback-loops or the less immediatly obvious the tradeoffs, side-effects or feedback-loops are, the more likelly they will be ignored or not understood.

Hence the common practice (in some countries) of selling impossible deadlines to customers and then using overwork to (try and) achieve those deadlines (via the "tired developers make more bugs" and the "low morale" negative feedback loops, overwork usually leads to LONGER development times and a longer tail of bugfixing before the software is accepted for production).

The same theory would also help explain the recurring reliance by some managers on the next "silver bullet" to solve all our problems - silver bullets are always sold as solving everything and having no downsides (thus no tradeoffs) and no side-effects (and thus no negative feedback loops).

Don't forget "Meta" Silver Bullets !!!

I am surprised Mr. Bell did not mention the latest wave in Software Development, "Meta" Silver Bullets, ie nebulous heuristics which are neatly packaged and given an MBA friendly label. Currently the mother-of-all Meta Silver bullets is "Agile Development" , which has only proven successful for the guys who write books about it and sell seminars on the subject.

Solutions vs Tools

I think a lot of this comes down to the 'solutions mindset' vs the 'tools mindset'. A 'Solution' is self-contained, operates itself, and requires little thought. A 'Tool', on the other hand, requires a wielder (or operator), may need other tools to be effective, and requires thought and skill to use.

The problem is that computer technology, by and large, is much more a tool than it is a solution, while management tends to gravitate towards 'solutions'.

Most 'silver bullets' are in fact useful tools, if treated as such. When treated as a solution, they always come up short, because no tool, by itself, is a full-blown solution. The result is that management ends up using and discarding one silver bullet after another, rather than concentrating on gathering a useful set of tools and a group of people capable of using them skillfully.

Transylvania? Who?

Look, now, it's *vampires* that are from Transylvania, not werewolves. Silver bullets work on werewolves, not vampires. Vampires need a stake through the heart or sunlight. Now get it right, dammit, or everything else you say is meaningless.

That does it...

I'm convinced. I'm gonna trade in my oversold silver bullet for a golden hammer!

It's the Programmers - not the Tools.

I believe military history and military science have something to help us illuminate this issue.

I am a reader of military history, and I recall reading about the German 81mm mortar in WWII - about how the allies conducted studies into its design after the war, as they wanted to find out what the German "secret" for such an effective weapon system was . . . the secret was, there was nothing special about the 81mm mortar - its crews were simply well trained, highly motivated, and well led.

The Germans did more with less, beat materially superior opponents consistently, and maintained tactical superiority up until the last moments of the war - I believe there is something to be said for all this (moral/political/personal opinions aside) and one of their core philosophies was that it's not the weapons, it's the men.

Now, the historical points I have brought up are debatable, however, I am convinced that the fundamental idea stands:

It's the Men, not the Weapons.

MRH

Re:strangly this whole thing

Your XML is off. You needed a tag.

Fortunately, /. has non-validating moderators.

Re:Current silver bullets

Just be glad you're not old enough to have gone through the fourth generation language management wars...managers were convinved by that hype that we could buy thes products and then we'd be able to get results by talking to the computers in English, just like the ones on the Enterprise in Star Trek. Instead, some incredibly resource wasting applications were produced, that had to be communicated with in a strange dialect of broken English - sort of a machine pidgin language...

Re:Silver Bullets are just marketing

Problem is "professionals" are often order about by the ill-informed that seem to be incapable of listening or understanding the professionals.

Re:strangly this whole thing

Since we're into making OT silver bullet references...

In the Marine Corps, "Silver Bullet" is the term used for the rectal thermometer the corpsmen stick you with.
It's mostly just a homophobic scare tactic to get everyone to drink water and not malinger.