Developer Oriented and Quality Assurance Based Simulation of Software Processes

Software process planning involves the consideration of process based factors, e.g., development strategies, but also social factors, e.g., collaboration of developers. To facilitate a project manager in decision making during the project, we develop an agent-based simulation tool which allows him to test different alternative future scenarios. For this, it is indispensable to understand software evolution and its influences. We cover different aspects of software evolution with models tailored towards specific questions. For the investigation of system growth, developer networks and file dependency graphs we performed two case studies of open source projects. This way, we infer parameters close to reality and are able to compare empirical with simulated results.