It was coined by Fred Brooks in his paper "No Silver Bullet – Essence and Accident in Software Engineering" https://faculty.salisbury.edu/~xswang/Research/Pape

It was coined by Fred Brooks in his paper "No Silver Bullet – Essence and Accident in Software Engineering" https://faculty.salisbury.edu/~xswang/Research/Papers/SERelated/no-silver-bullet.pdf https://faculty.salisbury.edu/~xswang/Research/Papers/SERela... "There is no single development, in either technology or management technique, which by itself promises even one order-of-magnitude improvement within a decade in productivity, in reliability, in simplicity." to expand on @lugg's answer below any promise of a blanket solution (often bolted on top of poorly designed systems) that try to mitigate the problems (without solving the underlying cause) examples are too numerous really but the paper is well worth a read