Quantifying the ramp-up problem in software projects
Lukas Pradel · 2016
When a software developer joins an ongoing software project, the team is faced with the ramp-up problem, a term coined by Brooks [4] that describes the period of time required by new developers to familiarize themselves with their new environment before they can make useful contributions to the project. Ramp-ups occur frequently in the professional field and are often associated with frustration and dissatisfaction due to their budget impacts and human factors. Our overall goal is to understand the underlying mechanisms and connections in the ramp-up process to develop and assess strategies for the ramp-up problem. Specifically, our envisioned contributions are to identify the important inuencing factors and to develop a mathematical model for the ramp-up process that is capable of predicting its course and duration.