Planning and Scheduling of Software Manufacturing Projects

In today’s highIy competitive and constantly growing market for software products, planning and scheduling of large software projects has become a bottleneck to increasing production productivity [1331. This work is to investigate the mechanisms required to support software project planning and scheduling (SPPS). Our approach is to 1. define SPPS as a reactive pmcess that involvw human negotiation, and 2. develop a heuristic search model, thar is consistent with the negotiation prccess. to improve an existing schedule by incrementauy revising it. The main contribution of thh thesis is that it represenm the fmt major effort in building a problem solving model for SPPS that accomodates the dominant characteristics of SPPS. Our problem solving model is based on the previous results in social analysis of computing, opemtions research in manufacturing, artificial intelligence in manufacturing planning and scheduling, and the haditional approaches to planning in artificial intelligence, and extends the techniques that have been developed by them in dealing wilh SPPS. We demonstrate the sufficiency of the model that has been developed on specific test cases that reflect actual software project planning and scheduling circumstances. A pmgram called NEGOPRO that uses OUT basic model to support SPPS in large software projects has been implemented.