This paper examines the issues of assisting software project managers in the decision making processes involved in the planning, managing and executing of a software development project. The role of software project management tools is examined and a proposal for an intelligent assistant system for software project management is set forth. The rationale behind this proposal is outlined and the ...

By their very nature, software projects require someone to coordinate and direct the efforts of the development team – the software project manager. Although this role has traditionally been viewed as a technical one, there is growing evidence from many sectors that technical skills are only part of what a software project manager needs to be effective. This paper delineates these knowledge are...

The problem of developing usable software project cost1 prediction systems is perennial and there are many competing approaches. Consequently, in recent years there have been exhortations to conduct empirically based evaluations in order that our understanding of project prediction might be based upon real world evidence. We now find ourselves in the interesting position of possessing this evid...

This thesis investigates the application of Search Based Software Engineering (SBSE) approach in the field of Software Project Management (SPM). With SBSE approaches, a pool of candidate solutions to an SPM problem is automatically generated and gradually evolved to be increasingly more desirable. The thesis is motivated by the observation from industrial practice that it is much more helpful t...

A Project Scheduling Problem consists in deciding who does what during the software project lifetime. This is a capital issue in the practice of software engineering, since the total budget and human resources involved must be managed optimally in order to end in a successful project. In short, companies are principally concerned with reducing the duration and cost of projects, and these two go...

In this paper, we describe the Software Tag which makes software development visible to software purchasers (users). A software tag is a partial set of empirical data about a software development project shared between the purchaser and developer. The purchaser uses the software tag to evaluate the software project, allowing them to recognize the quality level of the processes and products invo...

Project management presents the manager with a complex set of related optimisation problems. Decisions made can more profoundly affect the outcome of a project than any other activity. In the chapter, we provide an overview of Search-Based Software Project Management, in which Search-Based Software Engineering (SBSE) is applied to problems in software project management. We show how SBSE has be...

In this paper, the essential characteristics of software development projects in the open source environment are described. This model of freely distributed, highly decentralized, democratic software development with little management hierarchy, overhead, or salary compensation has made a revolution in the software industry. These open source projects, like typical commercial software projects,...

The importance of people factors for the success of software development is commonly accepted, because the success of a software project is above all determined by having the right people on the right place at the right time. As software development is a knowledge intensive industry; the `quality' of developers is primarily determined by their knowledge and skills. This paper presents a concept...