SIMULATION-BASED UNCERTAINTY ANALYSIS FOR PLANNING PARAMETERS IN OPERATIONAL PRODUCT MANAGEMENT
Ahmed Al‐Emran, Keyvan Khosrovian, Dietmar Pfahl, Günther Ruhe · Lund University Publications (Lund University) · 2007
Software product management takes place on strategic and operational levels. Strategic product management aims at assigning features to subsequent product releases such that technical, resource, risk and budget constraints are met. Operational product management focuses on the realization of a single software release. Its purpose is to assign resources to feature development tasks such that total release development time is minimized under given process and project constraints. In this paper, we investigate the impact of uncertainty in estimates of developer productivity and feature-related effort on the structure and performance of operational release plans (ORPs). More precisely, we study the impact of variations of these estimates on (i) the duration of a single release (ii) the stability of the assignment of developers to tasks, and (iii) the stability in the execution times of tasks. Our analysis applies a five step procedure, called ProSim/ORP. In an explorative study, we investigate a concrete ORP of small size. We perform three classes of parameter variations with a total of 600 simulation runs. Analyzing the results of this study, we observe that the impact of varying project planning parameters has statistically significant impact on project duration. Moreover, we observe high instability of developer assignments to tasks and strong variation of start and end times of feature development tasks in reaction to relatively small changes in estimates of developer productivity and feature-related