Over the last three decades, a significant stream of research in organizational behavior has established the importance of goals in regulating human behavior. The precise degree of association between goals and action, however, remains an empirical question since people may, for example, make errors and/or lack the ability to attain their goals. This may be particularly true in dynamically complex task environments, such as the management of software development. To date, goal setting research in the software engineering field has emphasized the development of tools to identify, structure, and measure software development goals. In contrast, there has been little microempirical analysis of how goals affect managerial decision behavior. The current study attempts to address this research problem. It investigated the impact of different project goals on software project planning and resource allocation decisions and, in turn, on project performance. The research question was explored through a role-playing project simulation game in which subjects played the role of software project managers. Two multigoal structures were tested, one for cost/schedule and the other quality/schedule. The cost/schedule group opted for smaller cost adjustments and was more willing to extend the project completion time. The quality/schedule group, on the other hand, acquired a larger staff level in the later stages of the project and allocated a higher percentage of the larger staff level to quality assurance. A cost/schedule goal led to lower cost, while a quality/schedule goal led to higher quality. These findings suggest that given specific software project goals, managers do make planning and resource allocation choices in such a way that will meet those goals. The implications of the results for project management practice and research are discussed.
The persistent turnover problem in the software field combined with the tendency of managerial succession to promote instability make this phenomenon of crucial importance to the student as well as the practitioner of software project management. The focus of most studies to date has been on the use of aggregated statistical data to answer macro questions regarding aggregates of organizations. On the other hand, there is a serious lack of micro-empirical analysis of turnover/succession and its impacts on managerial performance. This paper reports the results of a simulation-based laboratory study to investigate the impacts of managerial turnover/succession on software project performance. Specifically, the study examines the staffing and cost/schedule trade-off choices of successor project managers, and compares them with the choices made by managers who run their projects from start to finish without interruption. The results indicate that managerial turnover/succession can lead to a discernible (albeit unintended) shift in cost/schedule trade-off choices, affecting staff allocations and ultimately project performance in terms of both cost and duration.
In this article we investigate how staff turnover, acquisition, and assimilation rates affect software development cost and schedule. A system dynamics model of the software development process is employed as our experimentation vehicle. In addition to permitting less costly and less time-consuming experimentation, simulation-type models can provide useful insights into the causes behind the different behavior patterns observed. Our results indicate that staff turnover, acquisition, and assimilation rates can increase a project's cost and duration, by as much as 40 to 60 percent. This suggests that the three staffing variables are indeed critical for the successful development of software systems, as well as for the accurate estimation of software development cost and schedule.
Software quality assurance (QA) is a critical function in the successful development and maintenance of software systems. Because the QA activity adds significantly to the cost of developing software, the cost-effectiveness of QA has been a pressing concern to software quality managers. As of yet, though, this concern has not been adequately addressed in the literature. The objective of this article is to investigate the tradeoffs between the economic benefits and costs of QA. A comprehensive system dynamics model of the software development process was developed that serves as an experimentation vehicle for QA policy. One such experiment, involving a NASA software project, is discussed in detail. In this experiment, the level of QA expenditure was found to have a significant impact on the project's total cost. The model was also used to identify the optimal QA expenditure level and its distribution throughout the project's lifecycle.