Software project scheduling problem in the context of search-based software engineering: A systematic review

Abstract

This work provides a systematic literature review of the software project scheduling problem, in the context of search-based software engineering, and summarizes the main models, techniques, search algorithms and evaluation criteria applied to solve this problem. We also discuss trends and research opportunities. Our keyword search found 438 papers, published in the last 20 years. After considering the inclusion and exclusion criteria and performing the snowballing procedure, we have analyzed 37 primary studies. The results show the predominance of the use of evolutionary algorithms. The static model, in which the scheduling is performed once during the project, is considered in the majority of the papers. Synthetic instances are commonly used to validate the heuristic and hypervolume and execution time are the mostly applied evaluating criteria.