Human resources selection for software development projects using Taguchi's parameter design

Resource selection for choosing a best project team at the planning stage of a software development project is an important issue for reducing project cost, duration, and risk. Based on a real data retrieval software project, two cases of the software resource selection problem for single and multiple specialties under a dynamic, uncertain environment are considered and modeled. We then propose an integrated, efficient computational method based on design of experiments to solve the software resource selection problem, in which a critical resource diagram (CRD) is first used to show the interrelationships among human resources and tasks, followed by implementing Taguchi's parameter design approach to select appropriate human resources. In Taguchi's parameter design, human resources are identified as controllable factors while task complexities, which are generally unpredictable, are regarded as noise (uncontrollable) factors. The results show that our proposed approach is an efficient and effective method for human resource selection, which can achieve robust performance as well as significantly reduce project cost and duration. Moreover, use of CRDs in concert with a project planning table provides useful visual information, for example, to earmark bottleneck activities for attention, as well as cost information for budgeting management and control.