Reflections on 10 Years of Software Process Simulation Modeling: A Systematic Review

Abstract

Software process simulation modeling (SPSM) has become an increasingly active research area since its introduction in the late 1980s. Particularly during the last ten years the related research community and the number of publications have been growing. The objective of this research is to provide insights about the evolution of SPSM research during the last 10 years. A systematic literature review was proposed with two subsequent stages to achieve this goal. This paper presents the preliminary results of the first stage of the review that is exclusively focusing on a core set of publication sources. More than 200 relevant publications were analyzed in order to find answers to the research questions, including the purposes and scopes of SPSM, application domains, and predominant research issues. From the analysis the following conclusions could be drawn: (1) Categories for classifying software process simulation models as suggested by the authors of a landmark publication in 1999 should be adjusted and refined to better capture the diversity of published models. (2) Research improving the efficiency of SPSM is gaining importance. (3) Hybrid process simulation models have attracted interest as a possibility to more realistically capture complex real-world software processes.