Dynamic Scheduling and Workforce Assignment in Open Source Software Development

TL;DR

This paper introduces a comprehensive modeling framework combining system dynamics and agent-based models to optimize project scheduling and workforce allocation in open source software development, aiming to improve efficiency and quality.

Contribution

It presents a novel integrated framework that jointly models project scheduling and team formation using system dynamics and agent-based modeling, validated through a real-world case study.

Findings

Optimized project schedules improve workforce utilization.

Effective team formation enhances software quality.

Parameter variations significantly impact efficiency and quality.

Abstract

A novel modeling framework is proposed for dynamic scheduling of projects and workforce assignment in open source software development (OSSD). The goal is to help project managers in OSSD distribute workforce to multiple projects to achieve high efficiency in software development (e.g. high workforce utilization and short development time) while ensuring the quality of deliverables (e.g. code modularity and software security). The proposed framework consists of two models: 1) a system dynamic model coupled with a meta-heuristic to obtain an optimal schedule of software development projects considering their attributes (e.g. priority, effort, duration) and 2) an agent based model to represent the development community as a social network, where development managers form an optimal team for each project and balance the workload among multiple scheduled projects based on the optimal schedule obtained from the system dynamic model. To illustrate the proposed framework, a software enhancement request process in Kuali foundation is used as a case study. Survey data collected from the Kuali development managers, project managers and actual historical enhancement requests have been used to construct the proposed models. Extensive experiments are conducted to demonstrate the impact of varying parameters on the considered efficiency and quality.