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The things you mentioned are not silver bullets, as Brooks defined them. A "silver bullet" is a: >single development, in either technology or management techni
by mtlynch 3y ago
The things you mentioned are not silver bullets, as Brooks defined them. A "silver bullet" is a:
>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 take an easy example:
>We've got GIT, which is a huge improvement over ZIP files of source code stored on floppy disks.
This is a huge improvement over the previous flow of passing around ZIP files, but it doesn't yield an order of magnitude gain in overall productivity for a dev team. For it to yield a 10x improvement, it would mean that programmers were spending at least 90% of their time passing around source code.
It's for sure an order of magnitude improvement on the subtask of code collaboration, but it's not a silver bullet in itself.
I think collectively there have been advancements that have produced an order of magnitude improvement in dev productivity, but Brooks' claim was that there would be no one thing that eliminated 90% of a developer's work.
- valval 3y agoWho cares. When the first silver bullet tech that appeases his requirement comes along, my blog post will require 100x improvements in productivity, reliability, and simplicity.
- GrinningFool 3y ago"overall productivity" isn't necessarily the bar. If you're spending 1 hour a week managing git and you used to spend 10 hours a week managing zip files, it's an order of magnitude improvement.
- kaba0 3y agoI get your point but, no, it’s not for the same reason Amdahl’s law exists: if you already weren’t taking any significant time on something, even cutting the whole thing out would give you negligible benefits.
- mtlynch 3y agoI'm not sure what you mean. If we're evaluating whether Brooks was correct in his "no silver bullet" prediction, then overall productivity is the bar because his prediction was about overall productivity of a dev team. I agree that git improves productivity over passing around zip files, but it doesn't disprove Brooks' prediction.
- GrinningFool 3y agoFair point, in the context of a silver bullet his intent was clearly to describe a single thing that improved productivity across the board. I had to go re-read the paper to reset my perspective.
- BatFastard 3y agoGIT was based on previous version control system, PVC, SVN, etc. And it is probably more complicated to use than the older version were. Git is possibly better at distributed teams.