Multi-Skills Resource Constrained and Personality Traits Based Project Scheduling

Abstract

One of the primary jobs of a software project manager is to assign available resources to software development tasks in such a way that results in a high-quality product at a low cost. Software Project Scheduling (SPS) allocates the most appropriate human resource to project activities at the right time to reduce software project failure risks and minimise project makespan. In literature, the SPS problem is referred to as the Multiple Resource-Constrained Project Scheduling Problem (MRCPSP). The MRCPSP assigns human resources with multiple skills and proficiency levels to various project activities. Human abilities can be distinguished into technical/hard and non-technical/soft skills. The former describes the skills related to technology, tools, etc. While the latter deals with the skills related to the personality, such as being introvert, extrovert, sensing, etc. Recent studies have shown that some tasks may require specific soft skills. Moreover, the efficiency and productivity of the assigned resource significantly reduce if the soft skill requirements are ignored during task allocation. Ultimately, the development process might end up in lower-quality software products with higher development costs; worst case, the project may even fail. Several MRCPSP-based SPS approaches have been designed to reduce the development costs of software projects. These mechanisms consider the hard skills of a human resource with different proficiency levels. However, they overlook the soft skills required leading to the inefficiency of the allocated human resources. This will increase the project makespan and may cause higher development costs or even project failures. Therefore, to fill this gap, we propose Multi-Skill Resource Constrained and Personality Traits based Project Scheduling (MSRCPPS) considering the soft skills as well as the technical skills of a human resource during SPS. The main objective is to minimize software project makespan. Finally, the effectiveness of our proposed approach is evaluated against existing state-of-the-art using extensive simulations.

Weighted Multi-Skill Resource Constrained Project Scheduling: A Greedy and Parallel Scheduling Approach

“…However, it lacks consideration for precedence relationships between projects or tasks. In a related context, Akbar et al [4] propose a scheduling heuristic for MSRCPSP that accounts for the soft skills of human resources. This approach examines factors such as available resources, tasks per project, and precedence constraints, evaluating their impact on the overall project makespan.…”

“…Since, the task (n + 1) marks the end of the project and is a dummy node, B tn+1 denotes the end of the project. The objective function defined in Equation ( 1) is subject to 8 constraints depicted in Equations (2)(3)(4)(5)(6)(7)(8)(9)(10)(11). The constraint in equation ( 2) defines the fulfillment of the precedence constraints -the predecessors t i of a selected task t j must be completed before starting t j .…”

“…An ideal project schedule achieves project completion within the stipulated timeframe while minimizing project costs, all the while maintaining the quality of the final deliverable. Project scheduling serves as the conduit that transforms a project plan into a sequence of project activities, optimizing the project's total duration, all within the confines of pre-existing constraints such as human resource and the task precedence relationships [3], [4]. The Resource-Constrained Project Scheduling Problem (RCPSP) seeks to optimize activity start and end times to achieve the earliest project completion, considering both prerequisite relationships and resource constraints [5]- [7].…”