tailieunhanh - Software project management with GAs

Traditional software lifecycle development methodologies grew out of a need to control ever-larger development projects, and the difficulties of estimating and managing these efforts to reliably deliver results. These methodologies drew heavily on the principles from engineering such as construction management. As a result, they stressed predictability (one has to plan every last detail of a bridge or building before it is built), and linear development cycles – requirements led to analysis which led to design which in turn led to development. Along with predictability, they inherited a deterministic, reductionist approach that relied on. | ELSEVIER Available online ScienceDirect Information Sciences 177 2007 2380-2401 INFORMATION SCIENCES AN INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL locate ins Software project management with GAs Enrique Alba J. Francisco Chicano University of Malaga Grupo GISUM Departamento de Lenguajes y Ciencias de la Computation . Ingenieria Information Campus de Teatinos 29071 Malaga Spain Received 4 February 2005 received in revised form 27 September 2006 accepted 24 December 2006 Abstract A Project Scheduling Problem consists in deciding who does what during the software project lifetime. This is a capital issue in the practice of software engineering since the total budget and human resources involved must be managed optimally in order to end in a successful project. In short companies are principally concerned with reducing the duration and cost of projects and these two goals are in conflict with each other. In this work we tackle the problem by using genetic algorithms GAs to solve many different software project scenarios. Thanks to our newly developed instance generator we can perform structured studies on the influence the most important problem attributes have on the solutions. Our conclusions show that GAs are quite flexible and accurate for this application and an important tool for automatic project management. 2007 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. Keywords Automatic software management Genetic algorithm Project scheduling 1. Introduction The high complexity of currently existing software projects justifies the research into computer aided tools to properly plan the project development. Current software projects usually demand complex management involving scheduling planning and monitoring tasks. There is a need to control people and processes and to efficiently allocate resources in order to achieve specific objectives while satisfying a variety of constraints. In a general way the project scheduling problem consists in defining which .