The Effect of Communication Overhead on Software Maintenance Project Staffing: a Search-Based Approach

Brooks' milestone 'Mythical Man Month' established the observation that there is no simple conversion between people and time in large scale software projects. Communication and training overheads yield a subtle and variable relationship between the person-months required for a projec...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in2007 IEEE International Conference on Software Maintenance pp. 315 - 324
Main Authors Di Penta, M., Harman, M., Antoniol, G., Qureshi, F.
Format Conference Proceeding
LanguageEnglish
Published IEEE 01.10.2007
Subjects
Computer science
Educational institutions
Equations
Large-scale systems
Operating systems
Packaging
Project management
Search-Based Software Engineering
Software engineering
Software maintenance
Software Project Management
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Summary:Brooks' milestone 'Mythical Man Month' established the observation that there is no simple conversion between people and time in large scale software projects. Communication and training overheads yield a subtle and variable relationship between the person-months required for a project and the number of people needed to complete the task within a given timeframe. This paper formalises several instantiations of Brooks' law and uses these to construct project schedule and staffing instances - using a search-based project staffing and scheduling approach - on data from two large real world maintenance projects. The results reveal the impact of different formulations of Brooks' law on project completion time and on staff distribution across teams, and the influence of other factors such as the presence of dependencies between work packages on the effect of communication overhead.
ISBN:9781424412556
1424412552
ISSN:1063-6773
2576-3148
DOI:10.1109/ICSM.2007.4362644