Multi-Objective Dynamic Software Project Scheduling: A Novel Approach to Handle Employee’s Addition

Abstract

The software project scheduling (SPS) problem deals with optimal allocation of employees to tasks such that the project is completed within budget and schedule. This is well addressed in the absence of dynamic events and has been demonstrated in SPS research with the static scenarios only. The software development methodologies have evolved where customer requirements are not initially locked but are flexible to take into account ongoing additional requirements or changes. In this regard, ‘new employee addition’ has emerged as one of the critical dynamic events that could significantly disrupt the project budget and schedule. In this paper, the SPS is modelled as multi-objective optimization problem and a novel approach is presented to deal with ‘new employee addition’ dynamic event; that uses domain knowledge to generate a robust schedule. The proposed heuristic is further evaluated on 18 dynamic benchmark scenarios and 3 real-world instances. The results show that the proposed heuristic besides its capability to handle dynamic events also demonstrates good convergence while maintaining good distribution of solutions in a dynamic environment. The principal target audience for this research are project managers in software development organizations who will get optimal project reschedule under ‘new employee addition’ dynamic event particularly in complex, large scale and multi-project settings.