Probabilistic Method for Managing Common Risks in Software Project Scheduling Based on Program Evaluation Review Technique

Abstract

Project management and project scheduling are crucial to help development teams keep track of timing as well as resource allocation. In order to manage software projects, project managers need to anticipate, analyze the risk factors that may occur as well as their impacts on the progress of the project, and assess and adapt the project resource allocation. This paper concentrates on a quantitative approach for risk analysis in software project scheduling by taking advantage of Bayesian networks capacity (including related mathematical calculations) in modeling and assessing uncertainty and incorporates them in software project scheduling with program evaluation and review technique (PERT). Common risk factors in project scheduling are also examined, and a Bayesian networks model of 19 common risk factors and their causal relationships is proposed and confirmed. The research also borrows and implements categories and levels of risk from construction projects into software projects. A tool was built to experiment and validate the proposed model.