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Software developers organize their work autonomously. Agile development approaches give freedom to developers. However, the discussion about economy often leads to the comparison with manufacturing processes which are tightly organised. If developers spend too much time on inefficient activities, the performance might decrease. The worst example could be breaks. Breaks could be seen as a reason for economic problems by the management. This paper investigates the impact of breaks on the overall performance in software development. The investigations assume that if developers make pauses in a normal manner, this has not a negative impact on the profitability. In practice, the human-centric development process brings together a business process and a social process. The interaction of both processes was simulated. Due to the execution of 1.500 simulations, we obtained information on the economic progression of the development process under the influence of breaks. We determined the impact of breaks on the overall profitability. This investigation contributes to the discussion of freedom in software development. It helps managers to assess if employees who make breaks harm the profitability. This could lead to the implementation of further business constraints.

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The economics of software engineering [B. W. Boehm, Software Engineering Economics, Prentice-Hall, Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey, 1981] are strongly influenced by the way how software development processes are performed. Simulations give valuable insights in the performance of these processes. In order to research the economics of software engineering, a process analysis studio (PAS) was developed and presented [D. Kuhlen and A. Speck, Business process analysis by model checking, in Proc. 5th Int. Symp. Data-Driven Process Discovery and Analysis SIMPDA, eds. P. Ceravolo and S. Rinderle-Ma, 2015; D. Kuhlen and A. Speck, The way of designing a simulation software in order to evaluate the economic performance in software development, in ICCMS ’17 Proc. 8th Int. Conf. Computer Modeling and Simulation, Int. Conf. Proc. Series by ACM, 2016; D. Kuhlen, Kostensenkungspotenzialfunktion der Softwareproduktion, dissertation, Christian-Albrechts-Universität zu Kiel, 2019]. This simulation software was built to analyze the capacitive configurations of the software production. It helps to assess the impact of different configurations on the process output. However, this research emphasizes the impact of quality-related factors (QRFs) on the process output. This paper presents a proposal how to extend the simulation software model in order to facilitate qualitative analysis. In order to facilitate the understanding of the model and the evaluation of the contribution, offered by the proposal, Prolog codes are used.

In the past decade multiple challenges arose from the method of software development [4,4]. As described by Davenport, the development process needs an overhaul [4,4]