Silver bullets for little monsters: making software more trustworthy

Despite the legions of ideas about how to improve software quality, much commercial software remains untrustworthy. In this article, the authors make the case for at least taking small steps toward improved quality by using silver bullets "corrective actions or methods" to at least eliminate some common problems, the "little monsters" of the title. Here, they discuss three such problems "memory leaks, buffer overflows, and files that remain unclosed when a program terminates" and list several techniques proposed to eliminate them in software.