A SIMULATOR FOR PLANNING SOFTWARE PROJECT MANAGEMENT

In this paper, an attempt has been made to develop a Stochastic Simulator which helps in decision making to identify the critical activities which needs to be given due priorities to certain activities during the development of Software Project. In response to new information or revised estimates, it may be necessary to reassign resources, cancel optional tasks, etc. Project management tools that make projections while treating decisions about tasks and resource assignments as static will not yield realistic results. The usual PERT procedure may lead to overly optimistic results as many pass which are not critical but slightly shorter than critical on the basis of estimated activity duration or average durations. Due to randomness of durations, these pass under some combination of activity durations, could become longer then the average longest path. Such paths would be ignored while using the PERT technique on the basis of the average durations. In order to overcome this problem and be more reasonable, the said Stochastic Simulator has been designed by generating random samples from a specific probability distribution associated with that particular activity of SPM. The proposed stochastic simulator will be an asset in effort estimation to Project/Module Leaders to complete the assigned Software Development Task in stipulated time to enable the development house to release the product software in time to achieve the specific target by the consultancy uni