An Agent Based Approach for Effort Estimation in Production Support
Ashish Kumar Jha, Abhinay Puvvala, Sanjit Mehta, Veerendra Kumar, Harrick M. Vin · Tuwhera (Auckland University of Technology) · 2014
Estimating the effort required in resolving an incident for a production support engagement has been a long standing problem. Although, a lot of work has been done in software engineering field in estimating effort required for software development, there is no adequate body of work on production support effort estimation. Reliable effort estimates for handling each kind of incidents can have the benefits of planning the complete project engagement for many services firm which thrive on production support projects. This paper presents a framework for estimating mean effort required to resolve an incident. It takes agent based modelling approach to capture the attributes and interactions of the agents. The framework has been tested with few policy experiments to assess the amount of effort required to resolve the incidents and its impact on SLA compliance. The model has been tested with industry data and holds promise to be a reliable tool to conduct policy experiments and enhance resource utilization.