Brooks, Frederick P., Jr. The Mythical Man-Month, Anniversary Edition. Reading, Mass.: Addison-Wesley, 1995. This book contains the essays, "No Silver Bullet—Essence and Accident in Software Engineering" and "No Silver Bullet Refired." The first title is Brooks' famous essay reprinted from the April 1987 issue of Computer magazine. Brooks argues that there will not be, and more important, that there cannot be, any single new practice capable of producing an order-of-magnitude reduction in the effort required to build a software system within the 10 year period that started in 1986. "No Silver Bullet Refired" is a reexamination 9 years later of the claims made in the earlier essay.

Glass, Robert L. "What Are the Realities of Software Productivity/Quality Improvements," Software Practitioner, November 1995, 1, 4–9. This article surveys the evaluative research that's been done on many of the silver-bullet practices and concludes that in nearly all cases there is little research to support either productivity or quality claims.

Jones, Capers. Assessment and Control of Software Risks. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Yourdon Press, 1994. This book contains a detailed discussion of the risks associated with tool acquisition ("poor technology investments"), silver-bullet syndrome, and related topics such as short-range improvement planning.

Jones, Capers. "Why Is Technology Transfer So Hard?" IEEE Computer, June 1995, 86–87. This is a thoughtful inquiry into why it takes as long as it does to deploy new tools and practices in an organization.

O'Brien, Larry. "The Ten Commandments of Tool Selection," Software Development, November 1995, 38–43. This is a pithy summary of guidelines for selecting tools successfully.