Study On Strategy Simulation Of Software Project Schedule Control Based On System Dynamics

With the rapid and steady development of economy, China’s software industry has made considerable progress. The size of software project is increasing, the complexity and diversity of software products have been well developed. The development and production of software product have been facilitating people’s work and life, and are closely related to people’s work and life. However, while the software industry develops, the "software crisis" phenomenon still exists. Software project delay is still a common problem in the software field. The delay of the software project often directly causes the increase of the software development cost. At the same time, the software company ought to assume liability to pay compensation for the delay. And software project customers would lose market opportunities due to the delay of the project. Traditional project schedule control method has been widely used in practice, but also exposed a lot of problems. In this paper, the method of system dynamics is used to control the software project schedule, to systemly consider the main influencing factors of project progress, help managers overally analysis the scheduling problem and make the project schedule control decision.On the basis of literature research, we first introduce the project schedule control theory and system dynamics method, and describes the main structure of system dynamics model for project schedule control and the process of system dynamics in project schedule control in the application. Combined with the characteristics of software project, the reasons for using system dynamics to control schedule is elaborated. And then five subsystems of the software project schedule control were constructed:subsystem, schedule subsystem, human resources subsystem, subsystem of project performance and cost subsystems. On the basis of the validity of the model test, three kinds of scheduling control strategies were simulated, which are the overtime strategy, the progress goal adjustment strategy and the labor increase strategy. Each progress control strategy has been studied in a detailed way and sensitive analysis of the constant relative to the manager was made to assist manager’s decision making. According to the situation of staff turnover in software project, the corresponding strategies are designed. According to the simulation results, we could assistant managers to make decisions.The main conclusions of this paper are:first, extending the working hours in the early stage of the projec is better than in the early stage of the projec to catch up with the progress of the work. Second, when the actual progress is late, the appropriate adjustment of the progress of the target will help reduce the cost and improve the quality. The marginal benefit is decreasing with the increase of the adjustment range. Three, when adding the artificial to the software project group, the reduction of construction period is not proportional to the amount of the adding artificial and the phenomenon of diminishing marginal benifit exists. Adding the artificial in the early stage of the project is better than in the latter stage. Adding the artificial with low ability in the later period doesn’t help to speed up the progress but increases the cost. Fourth, we should not be blind to fill a vacancy when faced up with the staff turnover. When the staff turnover happened in the late stage of the project,no recruitment is superior to recruiting the artificial with low ability.In order to better assist managers to make labor increase decision, based on the reality of the difference of software developers, we classify the software developers depending on the ability and redesign the human resource subsystem for the scarcity of software project personnel, making system dynamics application in software project schedule control more refined.