How to Improve Project Management for Agile Federation Development

Developing a simulation federation out of a variety of heterogeneous simulation solutions is a complex task requiring very effective project management support in order to accomplish the common objectives and goals of this M&S federation. This thesis study conducts a detailed survey of available literature to identify the project management methods that can be extended to be applied to manage the development of simulation systems. The literature review led to the following two main results: (a) in general, there is insufficient literature dealing with M&S challenges for project management, (b) in particular, the two challenges of often changing requirements leading to a need of agile federations and the special role of conceptualization in the modeling process require support of M&S project management. The study underlying this thesis evaluated agile project management methods, in particular Scrum, and found that they are feasible and can be very effectively applied to support project management related issues in developing a simulation federation. In order to cope with the special role of modeling and conceptualization, a questionnaire was developed aiming to understand the current project management processes employed in the M&S community. The questionnaire provides a starting point for conducting further investigation to gain more insight on what project management support is needed in which stage of the M&S projects and which artifacts can be used to support the process