Research On Construction And Application Of Hybrid Software Process Simulation Models

Software process is a set of complex and closely related software activities, these activities are synchronous or asynchronous and they are driven by time or events. Software process simulation (SPS) has become an active research area for managing and improving software development processes since its introduction in the last two decades.With the continuous development of internet industry, the complexity of the software process management problem faced by people becomes more and more high, constructing a software process simulation model with a single paradigm cannot meet the modeling purpose. Therefore, hybrid simulation, the combination of simulation paradigms to address a problem, is becoming more popular in SPS community. The hybrid modeling approach can provide both qualitative and quantitative suggestions on tuning the software process to improve its quality and better meeting organizational needs. In order to simulate the software process from multiple dimensions to represent the real process more realistically, the hybrid mechanisms and integration strategies of hybrid software process simulation modeling need to be deeply studied.The objective of this research is to present the state-of-the-art of this research area, the hybrid mechanism when integrating paradigms, and more importantly provide practical support for the effective adoption of hybrid simulation in SPS context. Based on an extended systematic literature review, this paper presents the preliminary results by answering the research questions. Depending upon the way these simulation paradigms represent different aspects and levels of software process and the context in which they can be modeled by SPS, two hybrid mechanisms:Hierarchical Mechanism and Interlinked Mechanism, have been frequently employed. The detailed discussions of integration strategies and recommendations when applying hybrid simulation, and the application case of constructing a hybrid software process simulation model, may offer reference value to the SPS community.