Reflections on 10 years of software process simulation modeling: a systematic review

  • Authors:

  • He Zhang;Barbara Kitchenham;Dietmar Pfahl

  • Affiliations:

  • National ICT Australia, Alexandria, NSW, Australia and School of Computer Science and Engineering, University of New South Wales, Australia;School of Computer Science and Mathematics, Keele University, UK;Simula Research Laboratory, Lysaker, Norway and Department of Informatics, University of Oslo, Norway

  • Venue:
  • ICSP'08 Proceedings of the Software process, 2008 international conference on Making globally distributed software development a success story
  • Year:
  • 2008

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Abstract

Software process simulation modeling (SPSM) has become an increasinglyactive research area since its introduction in the late 1980s. Particularlyduring the last ten years the related research community and the number ofpublications have been growing. The objective of this research is to provide insightsabout the evolution of SPSM research during the last 10 years. A systematicliterature review was proposed with two subsequent stages to achieve thisgoal. This paper presents the preliminary results of the first stage of the reviewthat is exclusively focusing on a core set of publication sources. More than 200relevant publications were analyzed in order to find answers to the researchquestions, including the purposes and scopes of SPSM, application domains,and predominant research issues. From the analysis the following conclusionscould be drawn: (1) Categories for classifying software process simulationmodels as suggested by the authors of a landmark publication in 1999 should beadjusted and refined to better capture the diversity of published models. (2) Researchimproving the efficiency of SPSM is gaining importance. (3) Hybridprocess simulation models have attracted interest as a possibility to more realisticallycapture complex real-world software processes.