Causal Software Engineering: A Vision and Roadmap

• URL: http://arxiv.org/abs/2605.02454v1
• Date: Mon, 04 May 2026 10:58:05 GMT
• Title: Causal Software Engineering: A Vision and Roadmap
• Abstract summary: Causal Software Engineering (CSE) is a future paradigm in which causal models and causal reasoning systematically inform activities across the software lifecycle.<n>We outline (i) a causal-first workflow view spanning development and operations, (ii) a staged roadmap for tools and organizational adoption, and (iii) an evaluation and benchmark agenda for measuring progress.
• Score: 8.555120836654966
• License: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
• Abstract: Software engineering increasingly involves making high-stakes decisions under uncertainty, using signals from code, field data, and socio-technical processes. Recent AI-driven support (e.g., anomaly detection, predictive analytics, AIOps, as well as LLM-based agents) has amplified engineers' ability to detect patterns and synthesize content and recommendations, but many critical questions are interventional or counterfactual: What is the expected impact of changing a load-balancing strategy? Would an outage have been avoided under a different release plan? Correlational models answer "what tends to co-occur"; they struggle to answer "what would happen if we act." We propose Causal Software Engineering (CSE) as a future paradigm in which causal models and causal reasoning systematically inform activities across the software lifecycle, augmenting existing practices with explicit assumptions, uncertainty-aware effect estimates, and counterfactual diagnosis. We outline (i) a causal-first workflow view spanning development and operations, (ii) a staged roadmap for tools and organizational adoption, and (iii) an evaluation and benchmark agenda for measuring progress.

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