Task Scheduling and Software Project Planning Using ACO

The rapid development of the software industry, software companies are now facing a highly competitive market. To succeed, companies have to make efficient project plans to reduce the cost of software construction It is in medium to large-scale projects, the problem of project planning is very complex and challenging. For scheduling and staffing management, similarly to other projects (e.g., construction projects), management is usually conducted by project management tools and techniques. The traditional project management techniques like the program evaluation and review technique (PERT), the critical path method (CPM), and the resource-constrained project scheduling problem (RCPSP) model have been applied in software project planning. The three methods are important and helpful, they are increasingly considered to be inadequate for modeling the unique characteristics of today’s software projects. A software project is a people-intensive activity and its related resources are mainly human resources. Different software project tasks require employees with different skills, and skill proficiency of employees significantly influences the efficiency of project execution. As such, assigning employees to the best-fitted tasks is challenging for software project managers, and human resource allocation has become a crucial part in software project planning. Techniques like PERT and CPM lack the consideration of resource allocation and scheduling models like the RCPSP do not consider the allocation of employees with various skills. A new method for solving the software project planning problem has been developed. The method introduces an event-based scheduler. The method takes advantage of ACO to solve the complicated planning problem.