A decision support system for fuzzy scheduling of software projects

In this study, a fuzzy project scheduling decision support system applied to a real world software development project is presented. The purpose of the project scheduling system is to allocate resources (engineers with different skill and experience levels) to activities with different complexity levels and uncertain durations. The activities are nonpreemptive in nature and there are no strict precedence relationships between them. The activity durations are modeled by fuzzy numbers as a function of the skill level of the resource allocated to that activity and the complexity level of the activity. Skill and complexity levels are also represented by fuzzy numbers. The objective of the scheduling of activities is the minimization of the project completion time. In scheduling three heuristic scheduling rules are utilized. These scheduling rules are presented with their applications on sample problems derived from a particular software development project. The decision support system carries the task of organizing the input data entry for scheduling the generation of the schedule, and the presentation of the results to the user.