No Silver Bullet is a classic paper of software engineering written by Fred Brooks in 1987. Brooks argues that there will be no more silver bullets, i.e., there will be no more technologies or practices that will create a 10-fold improvement in software engineering productivity over 10 years. Brooks is best known as the author of the 1975 software engineering project management book The Mythical Man-Month.

The central argument has been interpreted to mean that there will be no more easy answers to software engineering problems.

=Accidental versus essential complexity=

At the heart of the argument is the distinction between accidental and essential complexity. Accidental complexity is problems that we create on our own and can be fixed. For example, the complexity of writing and optimizing assembly code is accidental and can be eliminated by programming in a high-level programming language such as Java programming language. Essential complexity is caused by the problem to be solved, and nothing can remove it. If users want a program to do 30 different things, then those 30 things are essential and the program must do those 30 different things.

The problem with software engineering is that we have cleaned up much of the accidental complexity, and the rest cannot be changed.

Perhaps the one technology to make the most improvement in the area of accidential complexity was the invention of high level languages, such as Fortran and Java programming language.

=To quality=

While the article was originally written in terms of productivity, the same arguments have been applied to quality and control.

The common view of software engineers today is that probably there will never be any more silver bullet technologies or practices, yet hope remains. Many advocates of specific technologies and practices promote their benefits and claim that they are silver bullets .

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