Toward a Calculus of Confidence

Programmers, and end-user programmers in particular, often have difficulty evaluating software, data, and communication components for reuse in new software systems, which effectively reduces the value programmers derive from those components. End-user programmers are especially ill equipped to exercise the customary high-ceremony means of evaluating software quality. We seek effective ways to use low-ceremony sources of evidence, such as online reviews and reputation data, to make components´ quality attributes easier to establish, thereby facilitating more effective selection of components for reuse. Achieving this will require identifying sources of low-ceremony evidence, designing the meta-information required to track the differing sources and levels of credibility of various sources of evidence, and developing a method for combining pieces of disparate information into overall estimates of component value.