Designing Software Components to Tolerances

Many traditional engineering designs, other than software, depend on the physical properties of components. Those properties enable the engineer to specify precise tolerances between those components. Software components are abstractions with no inherent physical properties. The absence of physical properties makes it more difficult, but not impossible, to design to tolerances. This paper describes some design metrics for designing software components to tolerances. It uses some already established design metrics, and expands on the role of other software practices already available. This paper also restricts the discussion to software components, rather than to the algorithms contained within those components.