The ball silver (of English silver bullet ) is an expression introduced in engineering Logiciel it into the Années 1960 by Frederick Brooks. Brooks indicates the whole of the supposed “techniques miracles” to make it possible magiquement to increase the Productivité programmers and to decrease the quantity of Bogue S in the produced programs, and thus to kill the dreaded monster, the going beyond of the times at the time of the realization of the computing projects.

Brooks, which reported its experiment in the Myth of the month-man , thereafter wrote a famous article, No Silver Bullet , where it questions “technologies miracles” of his time. The expression Silver Bullet is since entry in the language of the software genius. The opinion of Brooks is that the difficulties of realization of the software are divided into accidental difficulties (computer programming languages and systems hard and difficult to use) and into essential difficulties (inherent in the production of software). However, according to him, the accidental difficulties already were mainly eliminated, for example by the adoption of high-level languages; there will thus not be in the future of fresh allowing progress of important profits of productivity.

It quotes then a certain number of technologies presented like having to revolutionize software industry (the language Ada and the directed Programmation object) and explains why if these technologies make it possible further to decrease the accidental difficulties of the programming, they cannot remove with the essential difficulties.

External bonds

• No Silver Bullet, IEEE Computer Magazine , April 1987