OOPSLA 07 Workshop: "No Silver Bullet"

A Retrospective on the Essence and Accidents of Software Engineering

Workshop date:  Monday October 22, 8:30am-5:00pm
Location:  OOPSLA '07 Conference in Montreal, Canada

Website Contents

• Workshop Overview
• Article summaries -- some existing articles on the subject of "No Silver Bullet"
• Position Papers
• position papers from students in a Software Engineering course at NJIT
• Workshop Final Report -- Now online (October 23, 2007)
• No Silver Bullet Panel Session Report -- Now online (October 24, 2007)

Workshop Overview

This is the website for the OOPSLA retrospective workshop -- a discussion of the issues in Frederick P. Brooks' 1987 article No Silver Bullet.

What if we had a chance to rewrite Brooks' article today? What have we learned about effective software development techniques over the last 20 years? Do we have some experiences that reinforce Brooks' thesis?

This workshop will be a working session -- to identify the areas of reality and fiction in the Brooks article, and to develop the outline of an "updated edition" of No Silver Bullet.

Workshop committee

• Dennis Mancl, Alcatel-Lucent - Bell Labs (mancl - AT - alcatel-lucent.com)
• Bill Opdyke, Motorola (opdyke - AT - acm.org)
• Steve Fraser, Cisco Systems (sdfraser - AT - acm.org)