Distinguished
Lecture Series: The Inevitable Pain of Software
Development: Why There Is No Silver Bullet
Professor Daniel M. Berry
Cheriton
School of Computer Science
University
of Waterloo
Waterloo,
ON, Canada
Tuesday 19th
October, 10:00, InfoLab21 C60b/c
Abstract
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Programming
technology has improved immensely since its earliest days. However, no single improvement can be
classified as a silver bullet, despite all claims of its proponents. A vexing
question is why there has been no silver bullet. A variety of programming
improvements, i.e., models, methods, artifacts, and tools, are examined to
determine that each has a step that programmers find painful enough that they habitually
avoid or postpone the step. This pain is generally where the programming accident
meets the essence of software and its relentless volatility. Hence, there is no
silver bullet. It is claimed no substantial programming improvement can avoid
all pain; therefore there will never be a silver bullet.
Professor Daniel M. Berry
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Daniel
M. Berry is Professor of Computer Science in the Cheriton School of Computer
Science at the University of Waterloo. He has previous held professor positions
at the Technion and UCLA and he holds a PhD from Brown University. Dan is
particularly well known for his research in requirements engineering where his
notable contributions include help for dealing with ambiguity and other problems
associated with the use of natural language to express requirements. In
addition, he is active in research in several other areas of software
engineering and computer science.
Dan
has served on many programme and organizing committees. He serves or has served
on several editorial boards including IEEE Transactions on Software
Engineering, the Empirical Software Engineering Journal and the Requirements
Engineering Journal. He is a member of the ACM, the IEEE Computer Society and
IFIP WG 2.9.