A modular decomposition model for software project scheduling

The high level of activity in the development and maintenance of computer software makes the scheduling of software projects an important factor in reducing operating costs and increasing competitiveness. Software activity is labor intensive. Scheduling management of hours of software work is complicated by the interdependencies between the segments of work, and the uncertainties of the work itself. This paper discusses issues of scheduling in software engineering management, and presents a modular decomposition model for software project scheduling, taking advantage of the facility for decomposition of a software project into relatively independent work segment modules. Modular decomposition makes it possible to treat scheduling as clustering and sequencing in the context of integer programming. A heuristic algorithm for the model is presented with some computational experiments.