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Predicting Value from Design

Dr. Mary Shaw
Carnegie Mellon University

Talk:  Wednesday, September 28, 2005 
Talk:
10:30-12:00 a.m.
Location: Room 222 Erickson Hall.

Host: B. Cheng

Abstract: Early design decisions in software projects profoundly affect both the properties and the costs of the eventual implementation. It is much easier and cheaper to change these decisions during design than after implementation has yielded running code. Improvements in our ability to predict properties of an implementation without actually inspecting the code would enable software designers to better understand the consequences of early decisions and would facilitate comparison of design alternatives to a degree not currently possible. This talk will discuss some code-free predictive evaluation techniques and the challenges of harnessing them to provide a unified framework for reasoning about the overall value that should arise from a design.

Biography: Dr. Mary Shaw is the Alan J. Perlis Professor of Computer Science and Co-Director of the Sloan Software Industry Center at Carnegie Mellon University. She has been a member of this faculty since completing the Ph.D. degree at Carnegie-Mellon in 1972. Her research interests in computer science lie primarily in the areas of software engineering, particularly value-driven software design, appropriate dependability, and software architecture.