A Decision Model for Human Resource Allocation in Project Management of Software Development

Abstract

In project management, especially of software development, human resource allocation is critical not only for project success including timely delivery and products quality but also for cost estimation to a software company to decide to contract projects or not. Many approaches have been proposed to provide assistance for human resource allocation in view of minimizing project duration and project cost or maximizing revenue and efficiency. These approaches may sometimes not be comprehensive in real-world environments without addressing some key factors like transferring cost, communication, and negative efficiency, which usually have crucial impacts on assignment applicability. This article is proposing a framework for assisting a software company to evaluate existing resource for making decisions on whether the estimation of the tender is feasible, and assisting to make human resource allocation for team formation in fixed project duration with labor skill and budget constraint. Within consideration of both the cost and the efficiency, the performance is maximized to verges on the customers' expectations in software development project management on the basis of a real case. Before forming a team for a specific project with well-defined periods and numbers of people with different project roles, the values of key factors in the framework are calculated with individual foundation of computation. We formulate the decision process in integer programming models, and a simulation study is conducted to demonstrate the applicability of the proposed model to assist the decision making process of software companies for team formation. The results of four variants for maximum skill efficiency or minimum hiring cost are illustrated with different considerations of both key factors are included or not proposed in this paper, and demonstrate that these factors could bring out different sources to help companies in making further evaluations for allocating staff in a software development project.