Modeling and Simulation of Software Projects

Over the last twenty five years, software development projects have increasingly been plagued by schedule and cost overruns, while product quality is often poor. The term "software crisis" has been coined to highlight this situation. The lack of adequate methods and tools to support software development, and of techniques to simplify project management tasks have been identified as major factors contributing to the "software crisis". In reaction to this, the software engineering community has attempted to devise a number of analytical and constructive operations to both handle the complexity of software development and assure quality of the resulting products. However, despite an impressive evolution of methods and technology in the past years, neither the software development process nor overall product quality have improved significantly. Part of the reason for this appears to be a serious lack of understanding of the software development process. It is often unclear how to integrate methods and tools in the development process to achieve best results because little is known about the most important influencing factors that determine process and product quality.