Belief that a single solution can solve complex problems.
Named from Brooks's 1986 essay No Silver Bullet, which argued no single development improvement would yield an order-of-magnitude gain. Nearly forty years of tooling have largely borne that out.
In practice
- A team that adopts a new framework every year is as fast as it was in 2015, and each adoption was justified on its own.
- An organisation that buys a new project tool every two years has made forty small improvements and no order-of-magnitude one.