Predicting Value from Design

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.