Duong Pham CS 390 Dr. Hwang No Silver Bullet: Essence and Accident of Software Engineering In 1986, Frederick P. Brooks published an article about the difficulties programmers encounter when they try to design good software. The author argued that software is like werewolf. They are started out looking innocent then suddenly turn into a disaster with bugs and malfunctions. The difficulties were addressed and categorized into the essence and the accident. The essence is related to the specification, design, and testing. The accidence is related to the difficulties in implementation. The accident is easier to overcome then the essence. Nowadays, with the assistance of many applications, anyone can become a software programmer. Websites and flash games are easily made using applications like Expression Web and Adobe Flash Professional. Difficulties in implementation therefore have been greatly reduced. However, designing software remains a hard and challenging task. The author claimed that dealing with the accident alone cannot give an order of magnitude improvement and a 10 fold improvement in productivity, a silver bullet, would not be available in the following 10 years. This claim is difficult to be proven correct because there is not a standard in measuring the improvement in software designing process. Conceptually, I agree with Brooks as stating unless we focus on minimizing the essence, there will not be a significant improvement in designing software. The programmers transform ideas into working application. So as long as there is a right idea to begin with, the designing process is half solved. It is faster and easier to achieve the goal if we know what we are doing and where we are heading to. The right idea or the goal can be obtained through thecommunication between the customers and the programmers. These communicating difficulties build up the essence and will remain as long as people still have different opinions and frame of references. In conclusion, the werewolf can only be defeated by the silver bullet, a method that cleans all the essence of complexity in the software designing process. With the high speed of the innovating modern technologies, everything is possible. There will be one day when the customers will verbally create software without the help of software programmers, in a very far