Preemptive Software Project Scheduling Considering Personality Traits

Abstract

The success of software projects is inseparable from the effective scheduling of multi-skilled human resources. In software development, employees’ personality traits often affect the performance of their work. Additionally, software developers are usually multi-tasking, which makes software development tasks preemptive. In view of this, we investigate the preemptive software project scheduling problem considering personality traits (PSPSP-PT), which aims at assigning employees with different skills and personality traits to suitable tasks and determining the start time of each task with the consideration of preemption, multi-skill, and precedence relations such that the total cost of the project is minimized. We formulate a mixed-integer linear programming model for the PSPSP-PT and design a dual priority rules-based heuristic (DPRH). Based on a benchmark dataset that is generated using a full factorial design, computational experiments are conducted to analyze the performance of our DPRH. Comparative analysis with existing algorithms reveals that our DPRH is competitive in terms of efficiency and effectiveness.

Keywords

• software project scheduling
• personality traits
• preemption
• heuristic algorithm