A survey on the Software Project Scheduling Problem

Creating a plan for a software project is a recurring activity in software development organizations that plays a critical role in the project success. When creating a plan for a project, these organizations must deal with the problem of allocating resources to tasks in the project. Because of its importance, there has been considerable research focused on finding ways to solve this problem, which is known as the Software Project Scheduling Problem (SPSP). Solving this problem usually focuses on creating a schedule for a project with minimal duration and cost. As part of our work, we have found only one survey about the SPSP, however it focuses primarily on the methods used to solve it, while the rest of the surveys focus primarily on other scheduling problems such as the Resource-Constrained Project Scheduling Problem. In this paper, we present a survey of the current research focused on solving the SPSP. For this survey, we have analyzed and classified a number of research studies considering a set of criteria that include: the model used to represent the problem, the optimization goals, the optimization techniques used to solve the problem, the methodology used to evaluate the different approaches, and the main results. From our analysis, we produce a set of general observations and provide suggestions that we believe can be useful for future research in this field.