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.'"

Comments

Inability to deal with complexity

[Aceticon]

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).