Abstract. Project management presents the manager with a complex set of related optimisation problems. Decisions made can more profoundly affect the outcome of a project than any other activity. In the chapter, we provide an overview of Search-Based Software Project Management, in which Search-Based Software Engineering (SBSE) is applied to problems in software project management. We show how SBSE has been used to attack the problems of staffing, scheduling, risk, and effort estimation. SBSE can help to solve the optimisation problems the manager faces, but it can also yield insight. SBSE therefore provides both decision making and decision support. We provide a comprehensive survey of Search-Based Software Project Management, and give directions for the development of this subfield of SBSE. Software Project Management includes several activities critical for the success of a project (e.g., cost estimation, project planning, quality management). These activities often involve finding a suitable balance between competing and potentially conflicting goals. For example, planning a project schedule requires to minimise the project duration and the project cost, and to maximise the product quality. Many of these problems are essentially optimization questions characterised by competing goals/constraints and with a bewilderingly large set of possible choices. So finding good solutions can be hard. Search-Based Software Engineering seeks to reformulate software engineering problems as search-based optimisation problems and applies a variety of metaheuristics based on local and global search to solve them (such as Hill Climbing, Tabu Search, and Genetic Algorithms). These meta-heuristics search for a suitable solution in a typically large input space guided by a fitness function that expresses the goals and leads the exploration into potentially promising areas of the search space. Though the term Search-Based Software Engineering (SBSE) was coined by Harman and Jones in 2001 to cover the application of computational search and optimisation across the wide spectrum of software engineering activities (Harman and Jones 2001), there were already pockets of activity on several specific software engineering problems prior to the introduction of the term SBSE. One such topic was Search-Based Software Project Management, the topic of this chapter. In particular, there was work on search-based project scheduling and staffing by
A comprehensive review on Search Based Project Management can be found elsewhere REF .
Search-Based Software Project Management
Software Project Management in a Changing World
Engineering Computer Science