Calling Transylvania...Silver Bullets here...

website@infoadvisors.com — Fri, 21 Jul 2006 22:53:00 GMT

One of my favourite member benefits I receive for being a member of the Association for Computing Machinery, ACM ,is the print and online version of ACM Queue Magazine. You'd think that a rather academic organization like ACM would be lacking in the practitioner side of computing, but this magazine blows other society mags out of the water.

For instance, a recent column by Alex Bell of The Boeing Company comments on the increasing number of silver bullets in the software development industry:

Software Development Amidst the Whiz of Silver Bullets...

A call to Transylvania may be needed.

There are plenty of examples in the software engineering realm that demonstrate blatant disregard for Fred Brooks's sage advice¹ asserting that there are no silver bullets available now or in the foreseeable future with which to solve all difficulties. Regardless, 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. It is difficult to be overly critical of the individuals who have been impacted by silver bullets, however, because the software engineering space is being barraged with them as never before. Even the most savvy of software engineers must occasionally liken themselves to the infamous Neo in the film The Matrix and gyrate wildly to avoid being stricken by the many bullets whizzing by.

Veterans of the software industry will attest to having seen a number of silver bullets come and go in their time. The argentum projectiles of yesteryear, such as OO, high-level software languages, and IDEs, are now obvious to have been only low-grade alloys compared with the fine silver being discharged today. For example, today's silver bullets have demonstrated an unparalleled ability to provide implicit value to both text and diagrams, the power to shift the economics of software development, and a capacity to change the focus of long-established engineering disciplines. Only the passage of time will reveal the new and amazing capabilities promised of future silver bullets yet to whiz by.

I chuckled at Bell's use of personal examples to show why statements such as "the data will be stored in XML" provide no assurances of quality:

Alanah

Hi Sweetie, I really am not the weirdest Dad of all the kids in your school.

Love, Dad.

I'm certain that we in the data and process management industry are just as bad. I've been on projects where data models or UML models are prepared for the sake of the project plan, but add absolutely no value at all to the project or the resulting systems.

Sure, we have our own buzzwords and hype, but it seems to me that the development process is the greatest magnet for the weirdest silver bullets. I put these proposed methods right up there with fad diets and 419 scams.

What do you think are the most promising silver bullets in the next couple of years? What do you think are the most questionable ones, especially in the data and process management areas?

Karen Lopez: Musings on Data, Process, and Architecture

Calling Transylvania...Silver Bullets here...

Software Development Amidst the Whiz of Silver Bullets...

A call to Transylvania may be needed.