Component-based development is one of the core principles behind modern software engineering practices. Understanding of causal relationships between components of a software system can yield significant benefits to developers. Yet modern software design approaches make it difficult to track and discover such relationships at system scale, which leads to growing intellectual debt. In this paper we consider an alternative approach to software design, flow-based programming (FBP), and draw the attention of the community to the connection between dataflow graphs produced by FBP and structural causal models. With expository examples we show how this connection can be leveraged to improve day-to-day tasks in software projects, including fault localisation, business analysis and experimentation.

翻译：基于组件的开发是现代软件工程实践的核心原则之一。理解软件系统组件间的因果关系能够为开发者带来显著收益。然而，现代软件设计方法使得在系统规模下追踪和发现此类关系变得困难，这导致智力负债日益增长。本文探讨了软件设计的另一种范式——流式编程（FBP），并引导学界关注FBP生成的数据流图与结构因果模型之间的关联。通过阐释性示例，我们展示了如何利用这种关联改进软件项目中的日常任务，包括故障定位、业务分析与实验验证。