Practical Human Resource Allocation in Software Projects Using Genetic Algorithm

Software planning is becoming more complicated as the size of software project grows, making the planning process more important. Many approaches have been proposed to help software project managers by providing optimal human resource allocations in terms of minimizing the cost. Since previous approaches only concentrated on minimizing the cost, there has not been a study that considers the practical issues affecting project schedule in practice. We elicited the practical considerations on the human resource allocation problem by communicating with a group of software project experts. In this paper, we propose an approach for solving the human resource allocation problem using a genetic algorithm (GA) reflecting the practical considerations. Our experiment shows that our algorithm considers the practical considerations well, in terms of continuous allocation on relevant tasks, minimization of developer multitasking time, and balance of allocation.