Custom Project Nov 13 2011 23:47:27

Project Description:
An academic style paper (2000 - 3000 words).

Brief:
In his seminal paper “No Silver Bullet – Essence and Accidents of Software Engineering ” Fred Brooks Jr. questioned whether there could be a “silver bullet” that could lay to rest the monsters of missed schedules, blown budgets and flawed products. He argued that software development is ultimately reliant on good designers and good managers and so advances in technology and methodology such as object-orientated analysis and design or programming languages can never give more than marginal gains. He concluded that “Building software will always be hard. There is inherently no silver bullet.”

However that paper was written twenty five years ago and in that time there have been a number of advances which claim to specifically address the problems of large scale systems development.

You are to research and prepare a report on one of these new techniques from the following list:
• Web Ontological Language,
• Service Oriented Architectures,
• Product Line Development,
• NoSQL Databases
• Enterprise Architecture Frameworks

Your report should be an academic style discussion that critically evaluates the technique’s value in the light of software engineering’s inherent problems and concludes by discussing how far the technology does, or does not, go toward supporting the view expressed by Brooks in the quotation given above.

The report should have solid academic content and you should therefore base your discussion on at least one refereed paper from a leading computing or software engineering journal such as IEEE Software, IEEE Computing or Communications of the ACM.