The Software Engineering Silver Bullet Conundrum

Fred Brooks argued in 1986 that, for various reasons, no software engineering silver bullet would be found in the next decade. I argue now that the main reason that there can be no software engineering silver bullet is that as soon as one is produced, we software engineers move on almost immediately to solve even harder problems for which the silver bullet does not help much. That a silver bullet quickly ceases to be silver is the basic conundrum of software engineering silver bullets.