Process simulation will soon come of age: where's the party?

It has been said that any good idea takes about 25 years to be widely adopted by industry. Simulation modeling was adapted to software development projects and processes in the early late 80s and 90s with the seminal work of Abdel-Hamid and Madnick [1] in applying Systems Dynamics to software project management, as well as the work of Kellner [2] and Raffo [3] in adapting State-based and Discrete Event Simulation models to software development. Using the 25 year metric above, Process Simulation will soon come of age -- but where's the party? Why has Process Simulation not been widely adopted as other software engineering best practices such as inspections or cost estimation? Some of the obstacles include: • The need to show business value • Lack of understanding among software engineers and project managers • Lack of credibility in the inputs and consequently model results • The perceived cost of implementation • The lack of integration with existing process management tools • Not a critical project need This presentation discusses the obstacles which inhibit wide adoption of process simulation within industry and opportunities the process research community has to overcome them.