Foundations & Overviews

No Silver Bullet: Essence and Accidents of Software Engineering

Frederick P. Brooks Jr.

Software's essential complexity cannot be removed by tooling, so no single technique will deliver an order-of-magnitude gain.

Assumes having worked on software big enough to have gone wrong; no code and no mathematics

Out of the Tar Pit

Ben Moseley & Peter Marks

Complexity is the single greatest source of software failure, and most of it is accidental state that could be designed away.