Agent-based distributed performance measurement system for ITSP projects

Measuring the development of an enterprise software project progress and performance is crucial to assure a project follow its path. This attention stems in parts from the frequent reports of high profile cases of mismanaged in IT projects particularly in enterprise level such as information technology strategic planning (ITSP) projects. Many project performance measurement models and frameworks have been proposed to address the problem, however, they are usually hard to manage and inefficient in practice due to the complexity, distribution and dynamism of these types of projects. A large and growing body of literature has shown the advantages of employing the agent technology in distributed, dynamic, and complex environments. Therefore, in this study the advantages of the agent technology will be applied to improve the progress and measurement process of the software project performance measurement approaches. In this paper, a multi-agent system architectural model with the focus in implementation phase of the ITSP projects is proposed to promote and facilitate the process of project performance measurement. Furthermore the prototype of the proposed solution is explained and the evaluation approach is discussed

Reassessing Brooks' law through consideration of manpower abilities

When software projects falls behind schedule, managers make any possible reactions to avoid any schedule slippage, mostly by adding new people to their projects. Adding more people to a late software project may cause negative impacts on the progress of the project as the result of assimilation time, training overhead and communication overhead. Consequently, a project manager faces difficulties to make the decision whether to add new members to his team or not. Therefore, in this research we attempted to address the problem by understanding how software project managers can minimize the negative impacts of adding new people to delayed software projects. This research aims to explore the effects of adding manpower to a late software project through personnel factors trade-off analysis. Particularly, this study has the intention to examine whether a significant schedule improvement can be achieved with proper consideration of the new manpower capabilities, skills and experience. For fulfillment of this research, we built a system dynamics model to simulate the dynamic behavior of the project progress when new members added with different ranges of personnel capabilities. In addition, an example case study has been run and related simulation results are compared with previous models. The result of this study shows that significant schedule improvement of a late project can be achieved if people with certain level of capabilities are added to a project