Extension of a Simulation Software to Incorporate Quality-Related Factors in Investigations on Software Engineering Economics

Abstract

The economics of software engineering [B. W. Boehm, Software Engineering Economics, Prentice-Hall, Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey, 1981] are strongly influenced by the way how software development processes are performed. Simulations give valuable insights in the performance of these processes. In order to research the economics of software engineering, a process analysis studio (PAS) was developed and presented [D. Kuhlen and A. Speck, Business process analysis by model checking, in Proc. 5th Int. Symp. Data-Driven Process Discovery and Analysis SIMPDA, eds. P. Ceravolo and S. Rinderle-Ma, 2015; D. Kuhlen and A. Speck, The way of designing a simulation software in order to evaluate the economic performance in software development, in ICCMS ’17 Proc. 8th Int. Conf. Computer Modeling and Simulation, Int. Conf. Proc. Series by ACM, 2016; D. Kuhlen, Kostensenkungspotenzialfunktion der Softwareproduktion, dissertation, Christian-Albrechts-Universität zu Kiel, 2019]. This simulation software was built to analyze the capacitive configurations of the software production. It helps to assess the impact of different configurations on the process output. However, this research emphasizes the impact of quality-related factors (QRFs) on the process output. This paper presents a proposal how to extend the simulation software model in order to facilitate qualitative analysis. In order to facilitate the understanding of the model and the evaluation of the contribution, offered by the proposal, Prolog codes are used.