Seminar by Prof. Aditya P. Mathur
Newton's Law of Motion in Software Development Processes?
Prof. Aditya P. Mathur
Department of Computer Sciences
Purdue University
West Lafayette, USA
Date: Monday, November 10, 2003
Time: 2:30 PM
Venue: CS-101
Abstract
Automatic control is applied in many day-to-day applications, cruise control on the interstate highway being one example. The following question of considerable interest arises in the context of software development: "Can one apply the techniques of automatic control to the management of software development processes?" To answer this question a correspondence is developed between the software system test process and the spring-mass system. This analogy leads to a postulate analogous to Newton's second law of motion. Using this and two other postulates one arrives at a first order linear model of the software test process. Results of a case study to understand the effectiveness of the linear model will be summarized.