Enabling Effective Design Decisions during Software Development

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Software design involves activities that turn requirements for what a software system should do into an executing system that meets those requirements. The choices made during software design have a profound effect on the system, including its overall value and its correctness. Despite the significant consequences of the many design choices made during software development, little is known about the kinds of design decisions software developers face and the consequences of those decisions. The long term objective of this research program is to provide intelligent assistance to a software developer to help him or her make informed software design decisions and to enable prior decisions to be fluidly revisited and altered. This research program will enable software development to move from a sequential activity in which design decisions follow each other to allowing software developers to explore of a range of decisions. This exploration will permit the overall value of a system to be increased and choices that may have undesirable consequences, such as exposing vulnerabilities, to be minimized. Towards this long-term vision, I propose the following three objectives for the next five years of research. First, through empirical study, we will identify and catalogue different kinds of design decisions that occur and we will determine the scope of impact of various decisions. Second, we will create techniques to identify when decisions occur as a developer works with development tools, we will devise algorithms for recommending potential choices for a decision, and we will design user interfaces to effectively deliver recommendations to a developer. Third, we will create representations for the design choices made during development and we will develop techniques to enable the rolling back, and subsequent rolling forward, of a software development, to enable exploration and revisiting of different choices from a design decision point. This problem area came to light during my experiences leading a software development team in industry. Advances in this research area can provide new knowledge for software engineering and programming language and can produce techniques and software tools with immediate benefit to much of the $160B ICT industry in Canada. There is also potential for techniques developed for exploring design spaces to be used within the greater scientific community where design decisions can directly impact results on which policy and other knowledge rely (e.g., climate models).**