No Silver Bullet: Software Engineering Reloaded?

A celebratory panel took place at the 22nd International Conference on Object-Oriented Programming, Systems, Languages, and Applications (OOPSLA 2007) in Montreal. The occasion was the 20th anniversary of Fred Brooks paper "No Silver Bullet: Essence and Accidents of Software Engineering." The paper appeared in the April 1987 Computer, reprinted from the Proceedings of the IFIP 10th World Computer Congress (North-Holland, 1986). The panelist positions appear in the OOPSLA 2007 Conference Companion (ACM Press). Steve Fraser (Cisco Research) as impresario introduced the panel, which included Fred Brooks (Univ. of North Carolina at Chapel Hill), David Parnas (Univ. of Limerick), Linda Northrop (Software Engineering Inst.), Aki Namioka (Cisco Systems), Dave Thomas (Bedarra Research), Ricardo Lopez (Qualcomm), and Martin Fowler (ThoughtWorks). Steve started the panel noting that this was the 20th anniversary of "No Silver Bullet" which had appeared at McGill University the day of his doctoral defense. He polled the audience to identify how many members had read Fred's paper (approximately three quarters).