Quotes from work
No Silver Bullet

Fred Brooks

"No Silver Bullet – Essence and Accident in Software Engineering" is a widely discussed paper on software engineering written by Turing Award winner Fred Brooks in 1986. Brooks argues that "there is no single development, in either technology or management technique, which by itself promises even one order of magnitude [tenfold] improvement within a decade in productivity, in reliability, in simplicity." He also states that "we cannot expect ever to see two-fold gains every two years" in software development, as there is in hardware development .

“The complexity of software is an essential property, not an accidental one. Hence, descriptions of a software entity that abstract away its complexity often abstracts away its essence.”

Fred Brooks No Silver Bullet

Page 183.
No Silver Bullet (1986)

“The essence of a software entity is a construct of interlocking concepts: [… ] 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.”

Fred Brooks No Silver Bullet

Page 182 (italics in source).
No Silver Bullet (1986)

“Even perfect program verification can only establish that a program meets its specification. [… ] Much of the essence of building a program is in fact the debugging of the specification.”

Fred Brooks No Silver Bullet

Page 195.
No Silver Bullet (1986)

“Study after study shows that the very best designers produce structures that are faster, smaller, simpler, clearer, and produced with less effort. The differences between the great and the average approach an order of magnitude.”

Fred Brooks No Silver Bullet

Page 202.
No Silver Bullet (1986)