Iteration Scheduling Using Bayesian Networks in Agile Software Development

Abstract

In software industry nowadays, Agile Software Development methods have been largely adopted. Agile Software Development methods themselves can be considered a certain level of reducing projects risks. However, optimization of software project scheduling has always been big challenges in both practice and academia, since industrial software development is a highly complex and dynamic process. There is also a need for a probabilistic method that better model and predict uncertainty in software projects. This paper proposes an enhanced method and algorithm by combining optimized agile iteration scheduling and the ability to predict and handle risks in resource-constrained contexts of Bayesian Networks. Based on the method, a software was developed as a support tool for managers to control their project schedules. The tool also provides a reliable set of strategies of sequencing tasks in agile iteration scheduling.

A Critique on Task Allocation Processes in Distributed Agile Software Development

“…Summary of task distribution approaches, implementation of the tool, and three application scenarios are also presented in this paper [36]. e quality of planning in ASD is improved by considering planning factors such as dependencies and capacities of resources [37].…”

“…e software tool BAIS (Bayesian Agile Iteration Scheduling) using Java programming language is developed, used to control schedules, and supports a set of strategies for an arrangement of tasks in ASD [37].…”

“…Many objectives are defined in proposed researches, for example, minimizing the development effort [79], minimizing defects [78,80], minimizing cost [1,4,8,13,14,16,18,19,25,33,36,76,[81][82][83][84][85], minimizing time [8,13,14,18,19,33,36,37,55,78,81,83,85], increasing quality [8,13,14,18,19,24,33,36,55,56,76], timelines of completion of tasks [57], increasing team members' productivity [42,43], improving work relationship and maximizing project's requirements [83], on-time completion, on- budget completion, functionality completion, and satisfying required quality…”

“…is can be considered as an optimization problem in which the resource allocation consists in assigning time intervals to the execution of the activities (realization tasks) while taking into consideration both temporal (precedence between tasks) and resource constraints (resource availability) and the minimum execution time objective [37].…”

“…ese task requirements must be identified timely to overcome later issues of development. Some task requirements are identified, for example, task complexity [6, 14-16, 20-25, 55, 58, 65, 79], task type [6, 13, 15, 19, 22-25, 30, 36, 41, 55, 65, 67, 78, 84, 95], task with the strict timeline [30], required budget [14], required skills [4, 6, 13-15, 23, 24, 24, 30, 34, 35, 44, 65, 81, 84], coupling between tasks [4,6,9,13,14,28,34,35,37,44,54,55,65,68,73,80,81,85,89,95], deadline [34], required resources [34], required effort [14,20,24,24,34], task size [6,28,30,68]…”