OPTIMIZING COST IN SOFTWARE DEVELOPMENT PROJECTS

The development of software projects requires the co-ordination of the efforts of a team of professionals with varying skills. Given the time, quality and cost constraints, the major problem in software development is to assign the right personnel to the right job at the right time and at the right cost. In this study, we propose a skill-to-time model in which the task processing time varies in accordance with the level of skill possessed by the personnel assigned to the task. We cast the problem as a cost optimization problem with several practical constraints and find an optimal solution using the Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO).