Causal Analysis and Software and Systems Engineering

Anandi Hira and Jim Alstad – A practical application of Causal Analysis

Software and Systems Engineering share the tasks of planning and managing their activities. This talk will describe the use of Causal Analysis to better understand how to estimate the cost of development/engineering which is in turn used in the planning and management of the work. While this talk addresses a particular type of engineering data, i.e. for engineering effort and related parameters, it is also meant to encourage the audience to apply the techniques to their own data.

This talk will cover the topic in four parts:

1. An introduction to causal analysis
2. A live demonstration of the Tetrad causal analysis tool
3. An introduction to the sources of the data we analyzed: the calibration data sets for COCOMO II and COSYSMO 3.0.
4. Application of causal analysis to the datasets, including the need for weak signal analysis and the generation of estimating equations.

Speaker Biographies:

DR JIM ALSTAD
Dr Jim Alstad received his PhD from USC under Dr Barry Boehm in 2018; his thesis topic was "COSYSMO 3.0: An Extended, Unified Cost Estimating Model for Systems Engineering". Previously, Jim had a 32-year career in software engineering at Hughes Aircraft and Boeing Satellite Systems. At Boeing Jim worked on satellite flight software on a variety of systems, including leading the Wideband Global SATCOM flight software team. He was an Associate Technical Fellow at Boeing. On the side, Jim taught courses at USC in various capacities for 13 years. He holds a patent on a satellite algorithm, “Fast Pair Catalog Access”. Next year, Jim will have been a member of ACM for 50 years.

ANANDI HIRA
Anandi Hira is a Cost Analyst at Tecolote Research Inc, and has received her PhD in software cost estimation under Dr. Barry Boehm at University of Southern California (USC). For her research, she collected data and calibrated the COCOMO® II model to include functional size metrics. Her research interests include software metrics and its application to project management, software cost estimation, and software process improvement.

Register for this Zoom Webinar at:
https://acm-org.zoom.us/webinar/register/7616190379791/WN_eSFIF3P0SRmsH87X0C3Brw

Co-sponsors

This event is co-sponsored by the IEEE Orange County Computer Society and the Los Angeles Chapter of the ACM.