A system dynamics software process simulator for staffing policies decision support

Abstract

Staff attrition is a problem often faced by software development organizations. How can a manager plan for the risk of losses due to attrition? Can policies for this purpose be formulated to address his/her specific organization and project? A software development process simulator tuned to a specific organization is used for running "what-if" scenarios for assessing the effects of managerial staffing decisions on a project's budget, schedule and quality. We developed a system dynamics simulator of an incremental software development process and used it for analyzing the effect of the following policies: to replace engineers who leave the project, to overstaff in the beginning of the project, or to do nothing, hoping that the project will still be completed in time and within budget. This paper presents the simulator, the experiments that we ran, the results that we obtained, and our analysis and conclusions.