An Integrated Multi-Agent-Based Simulation Approach to Support Software Project Management

Software projects often do not accomplish what is expected. They fail to comply with the planned schedule, cost more than predicted, or are simply not completed at all owing to issues such as bad planning, a poorly chosen team or an incorrect definition of the tasks to be performed. Although simulation methods and tools have been introduced to alleviate these problems, there is a lack of simulation approaches that integrate software project knowledge, software development processes, project-related situation-awareness, and learning techniques to help project managers to make more informed decisions and hence reach successful conclusions with software projects. In addition, in order to be more proactive, such approaches need to provide simulations based on both static and dynamic situation-awareness data, support (self-)adaptive project planning and execution, and recommend remedial courses of action when real-time project anomalies occur. In this context, this PhD research aims to create an integrated multi-agent-based simulation to support software project management in a more comprehensive way.