Possible implications of design decisions based on predictions

Software systems and applications are increasingly constructed as assemblies of preexisting components. This makes software development cheaper and faster, and results in more favorable preconditions for achieving higher quality. This approach, however, introduces several problems, most of them originating from the fact that preexisting software components behave as black boxes. One problem is that it is difficult to analyze the properties of systems in which they are incorporated. To simplify the evaluation of system properties, different techniques have been developed to predict the behavior of systems on the basis of the properties of the constituent components. Because many cannot be formally specified, these techniques make use of statistical terms such as probability or mean value to express system properties. This paper discusses ethical aspects of the interpretation of such predictions. This problem is characteristic of many domains (data mining, safety-critical systems, etc.) but it is inherent in component-based software development