Application Of Process Simulation Technology In Software Project Management

The software project's failure rate is very high, one of the mainly causes is that theuncertainty of software project is high, project estimation is difficult and the project cannoteffectively prediction and monitoring. Although the industry has had some prediction models,but all these models have some limitation and can't comprehensively solve the projectmanagement problem. With the process simulation technology continuing to mature,computer processing capability strengthened, some powerfully process simulation tools weredeveloped, the time of process simulation technology been applied to software projectmanagement is ripe. In software project management, applying process simulation technologywill greatly enhance the project prediction ability and reduce the rate of project failure. Butthe process simulation technology involves a lot of process management and statisticsknowledge, software enterprises usually are a shortage of experience and knowledge in thisaspect, but also don't know how to build and application process simulation model.The goal of this paper is to study a feasible method. The paper discusses how to applyprocess simulation technology to solve the current planning and monitoring problem ofsoftware project management. This paper analyzes the characteristics of software project,selects the appropriate process simulation technology. This paper discusses how to establishthe process simulation model, and what are the data input of the model, and how to analyzethe simulation results of the model. Finally, the paper through an actual case shows theapplications of process simulation model in software project management.First, organization should set up process asset library, and the process asset repositorycontains processes that coverage the project life cycle; Then decomposition the company'sbusiness objectives into the concrete process, and set up the process performance goals; Inorder to measure the performance of the process, organization established the processmeasurement standards, and collected enough process measurement data; Organization analysis these metrics from stability and process capability views, and also build processperformance baselines; Organization also analyzed the statistical relationship with factors andresults of a process, and the statistical relationship between two process, and create theregression model which can forecast; Finally organization apply process performancebaselines and regression model successfully building a process simulation model, andapplying it to project management activities. In project management process, project use theestablished process simulation model, when the project beginning, using the processsimulation model, project select processes from process assets library which contains manycandidate processes to get the process sets which can meet the project goals greatest, thenproject verify the feasibility of the selection through the simulation; During the execution ofthe projects, project also used the process simulation model to quantitatively monitor andcontrol project. Project monitors the stability of the process and the process capability in realtime, and monitors the project's current state with the influence of the overall goal. Projectcan timely found the problem, and through the root cause analysis, project finds the rootcause of the problem and takes the corrective action. Through the process simulation modelproject confirm that the corrective action can meet the goal, finally project make project backon track. The facts proved that process simulation model can actually improve projectmanagement, increase the prediction ability and monitoring ability.Finally, this paper also talks about how the software enterprise applies processsimulation model in other activities, and the limitations of applying the process simulationmodel.