Ask HN: What parts of software engineering can be quantified?
2 by bordercases | 0 comments on Hacker News.
I've seen obvious instances of quantification of software engineering – obvious in hindsight, anyhow. Capacity planning and network performance get strong mathematical treatments in textbooks such as "Computer Architecture: A Quantitative Approach". But I've also seen less-than-obvious quantifications and mathematical models. The second chapter of "Hello Startup!" represents a model of Agile vs Waterfall method in terms of total cost-under-curve for learning, complete with graphs. I've also seen the process of debugging code be represented in Bayes Theorem, but that was only one problem in a textbook. And of course anything by Knuth or Sedgewick tends to carry this flavour with their takes on data structures. But that's moving a bit far from software creation in the mobile-app and web-app sense. What are examples of practical mathematical modelling and quantification in software-engineering?
