Abstract
The adequate allocation of human resources is one of the most important success factors in software projects. Although project teams can be regarded as complex systems in which a team’s performance is highly influenced by the interdependencies among team members, the allocation methods applied to date have focused only on individual skills and consider project teams as units of isolated workers. The existing software project scheduling problem (SPSP) is extended to (1) consider different skills and efficiencies of employees and (2) examine the pairwise synergies between them, as well as to (3) handle the flexible structure of the project that is used in flexible management, such as agile project management. To better understand the impact of synergies on the project’s cost, the solutions of the traditional and extended SPSP versions are analyzed and compared on the generated project networks. The results show not only that this factor has a highly significant impact but also that the project cost strongly depends on the structural parameters of the synergy network (e.g., topology, network size and degree centrality). Among these parameters, a low degree of centrality and some topologies, most notably star and circular networks, obtained the highest reduction in the projects’ total cost.
Highlights
The tasks of allocating human resources and scheduling play a critical role in the success of software development projects and, in competition in the IT industry (Nan and Harter 2009)
A novel synergy-based method is presented, and the following research questions (RQs) are subsequently answered: RQ1 : Which indicators influence the effect of synergy on the project cost? RQ2 : Which structures of synergy networks increase/decrease the projects’ costs the most?
In the case of the software project scheduling problem (SPSP), the size of the project (Na) and the various skills of employees (Nsk) are the main factors impacting project costs; if synergies between two employees are considered, the principal effect is due to the average pairwise synergy (AvgSyn) itself
Summary
The tasks of allocating human resources and scheduling play a critical role in the success of software development projects and, in competition in the IT industry (Nan and Harter 2009). This multiobjective nature makes planning even more complicated and, as a result of the increasing size of software projects, makes manual scheduling almost impossible (Shen et al 2018). Even though human aspects are an important factor in the success of software projects and should be a key research area within the field of software project planning, existing studies have only explored the human properties of task selection and scheduling to a limited extent (Shen et al 2018).
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