Software Multi-project Resource Scheduling: A Comparative Analysis
Software organizations are always multi-project-oriented, in which situation the traditional project management for individual project is not enough. Related scientific research on multi-project is yet scarce. This paper reports result from a literature r
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Institute of Software, Chinese Academy of Sciences University of Chinese Academy of Sciences {dongsquare, zhaoyuzhu, lijuan, ye}@itechs.iscas.ac.cn, [email protected] 2 Graduate
Abstract. Software organizations are always multi-project-oriented, in which situation the traditional project management for individual project is not enough. Related scientific research on multi-project is yet scarce. This paper reports result from a literature review aiming to organize, analyze and make sense out of the dispersed field of multi-project resource scheduling methods. A comparative analysis was conducted according to 6 aspects of application situations: value orientation, centralization, homogeneity, complexity, uncertainty and executive ability. The findings show that, traditional scheduling methods from general project management community have high degree of centralization and limited capability to deal with uncertainty, and do not well catered for software projects. In regard to these aspects agile methods are better, but most of them lack scalability to high complexity. Some methods have balanced competence and special attention should be paid to them. In brief, methods should be chosen according to different situations in practice. Keywords: software multi-project management, agile methods, resource allocation and scheduling, survey.
1 Introduction Most project life cycles share a common characteristic: cost and staffing levels are low at the start, peak during the intermediate phases, and drop rapidly as the project draws to a conclusion [37]. As for individual participant, energy input does not remain unchanged along the whole life cycle. Sharing human resources across projects can decrease idle time and increase utilization of resources, and also facilitate sharing common technologies and components so as to reduce development cost. It can serve as ways of knowledge transferring and cross-training too. Traditional Project Management (PM) focus on individual project, however, up to 90%, by value, of all projects are carried out in the multi-project environments [46], and multi-PM is a new trend in PM community [15]. Software organizations commonly work in multi-project environments [25], but little systematic study concentrates on managing multiple software projects, and little research about multi-project comes from software development community. Just take IEEE database as an example, we searched ((multiple projects) (project portfolio) (program management)) on Nov 27 Q. Wang, D. Pfahl, and D.M. Raffo (Eds.): ICSP 2008, LNCS 5007, pp. 63 – 75, 2008. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2008
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2007 and obtained 219 papers (unrelated articles included), among which only 45 come from software (or computer science, information system) community. In a representative PM journal, International Journal of Project Management (IJPM), we searched ("multiple projects" OR "multi-project" OR "project portfolio" OR "program") in latest papers after year 2000, and got 78 results. Only three of them have an a
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