Search-Based Software Project Management
Project management presents the manager with a complex set of related optimisation problems. Decisions made can more profoundly affect the outcome of a project than any other activity. In the chapter, we provide an overview of Search-Based Software Projec
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Search-Based Software Project Management Filomena Ferrucci, Mark Harman, and Federica Sarro
Abstract Project management presents the manager with a complex set of related optimisation problems. Decisions made can more profoundly affect the outcome of a project than any other activity. In the chapter, we provide an overview of SearchBased Software Project Management, in which search-based software engineering (SBSE) is applied to problems in software project management. We show how SBSE has been used to attack the problems of staffing, scheduling, risk, and effort estimation. SBSE can help to solve the optimisation problems the manager faces, but it can also yield insight. SBSE therefore provides both decision making and decision support. We provide a comprehensive survey of search-based software project management and give directions for the development of this subfield of SBSE.
15.1
Introduction
Software Project Management includes several activities critical for the success of a project (e.g., cost estimation, project planning, quality management). These activities often involve finding a suitable balance between competing and potentially conflicting goals. For example, planning a project schedule requires to minimise the project duration and the project cost, and to maximise the product quality. Many of these problems are essentially optimisation questions characterised by competing
F. Ferrucci DISTRA, University of Salerno, Salerno, Italy e-mail: [email protected] M. Harman • F. Sarro (*) CREST, Department of Computer Science, University College London, London, UK e-mail: [email protected]; [email protected] G. Ruhe and C. Wohlin (eds.), Software Project Management in a Changing World, DOI 10.1007/978-3-642-55035-5_15, © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2014
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F. Ferrucci et al. SB Software Project Management
SB Project Scheduling and Staffing
SB Software Development Effort Estimation
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Number of Papers
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0 1993 1994 1995 1996 1997 1998 1999 2000 2001 2002 2003 2004 2005 2006 2007 2008 2009 2010 2011 2012 2013
Fig. 15.1 Number of relevant publications on the use of search-based approaches for software project management from 1993 to 2013 [source Zhang (2013)]
goals/constraints and with a bewilderingly large set of possible choices. So finding good solutions can be hard. Search-based software engineering seeks to reformulate software engineering problems as search-based optimisation problems and applies a variety of metaheuristics based on local and global search to solve them (such as Hill Climbing, Tabu Search, and Genetic Algorithms). These meta-heuristics search for a suitable solution in a typically large input space guided by a fitness function that expresses the goals and leads the exploration into potentially promising areas of the search space. Though the term Search-Based Software Engineering (SBSE) was coined by Harman and Jones in 2001 to cover the application of computational search and optimisation across the wide spectrum of software engineering activ
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