Are DevOps and Automation Our Next Silver Bullet?

Fred brooks, in his well-known classic The Mythical Man-Month, already told the software engineering industry in 1975 that there are no silver bullets in gaining an order-of-magnitude improvement in software productivity.¹ He also observed that "most of the big past gains in software productivity have come from removing artificial barriers that have made the accidental tasks inordinately hard, such as severe hardware constraints, awkward programming languages, lack of machine time." The hope and goal of software development processes in orchestrating the essential and accidental software engineering and development tasks is precisely to remove artificial barriers to delivering better, faster, cheaper software to the users. Our next silver bullet seems to have emerged as automating repeatable, manual process tasks. While, on one hand, we debate how to scale agile, on the other, we run to DevOps, continuous integration, and continuous delivery tools to achieve the so-called orders of magnitude of productivity improvement.