The Software Engineering research community have spent considerable effort in developing models to predict the behaviour of software. A number of these models have been derived based on the pre and post behaviour of the development of software products, but when these models are applied to other products, the results are often disappointing. This appears to differentiate Software from other engineering disciplines that often depend on generic predictive models to verify the correctness of their products. This short paper discusses why other engineering disciplines have managed to create generalized models, the challenges faced by the Software industry to build these models, and the change we have made to our process in Microsoft to address some of these challenges.

Brendan Murphy is a Principal Researcher at the Microsoft Research Centre in Cambridge UK. Brendan works on the Empirical Software Engineering and Measurement (ESM) activities in Microsoft focusing on software reliability, dependability, quality and process issues. Prior to his current position at Microsoft, Brendan was at Compaq Corporation (previously Digital), Ayr Scotland till August 1999, where he ran a program which collected and analyzed dependability data from customer sites. Prior to working in Scotland, Brendan worked for Digital in Galway Ireland, UNISYS (Scotland and US) and ICL (West Gorton, Manchester). Brendan graduated from Newcastle University.