Paper Info
Title
An Empirical Study of Search-Based Task Scheduling in Global Software Development.
Abstract
Scheduling tasks is one of the critical duties of software project managers. The main objective of the scheduling is typically reducing the project's cost and duration. However, the numerous possible assignments of tasks to the team members and the dependencies between tasks make task scheduling an NP-hard problem. In the context of Global Software Development (GSD) projects, specifically, reducing the development time is one of the cornerstones. However, some of the GSD characteristics such as having people from different locations, working in different time zones, and perhaps involved in the same software tasks (Follow the Sun approach) make the scheduling even more difficult for the manager. Recently, several techniques based on evolutionary search algorithms have been proposed to automatically optimize the task scheduling in traditional software development projects. In this paper, we apply the same concepts in the context of GSD projects. We have implemented a Genetic algorithm-based assignment technique that uses a queue-based GSD simulator for fitness function evaluation. Our technique has been evaluated based on three project's datasets from two large-scale organizations that practice GSD. The results show that the search-based approach can in some cases improve the assignments compared to the actual assignments by the managers, in terms of reducing the projects duration. We also report the actual project managers' feedback on the automatic assignments.
Year
DOI
Venue
2017
10.1109/ICSE-SEIP.2017.30
ICSE-SEIP
Keywords
Field
DocType
genetic algorithm, project management, task scheduling, global software development, follow the sun
Systems engineering,Scheduling (computing),Computer science,Real-time computing,Two-level scheduling,Software project management,Software,Dynamic priority scheduling,Software development,Follow-the-sun,Project management
Conference
ISBN
Citations 
PageRank 
978-1-5386-2718-1
0
0.34
References 
Authors
18
3
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Josiane Kroll1488.52
Shai Fridboim200.34
Hadi Hemmati362227.54