A Multi-objective Approach to the Software Project Scheduling Problem

The Software Project Scheduling (SPS) problem relates to the decision of who does what during a software project lifetime. This problem has a capital importance for software companies. In the SPS problem, the total budget and human resources involved in software development must be managed optimally in order to end up with a successful project. Companies are mainly concerned with reducing both the duration and the cost of the projects, and these two goals are in conflict with each other. A multi-objective approach is therefore the natural way of facing the SPS problem. In this paper, several algorithms from the domain of the metaheuristics have been used to address this problem. They have been thorougly compared over a set of 36 publicly available instances that cover a wide range of different scenarios. The resulting project schedulings of the algorithms have been analized in order to show their relevant features. The multi-objective approach has been also compared to the single-objective one, in which the objectives are weighted according to their importance for the company. The algorithms used in this paper and the analysis performed may assist project managers in the difficult task of deciding who does what in a software project.