A key factor in the management of software projects is the ability of the manager to handle delays in the hiring and assimilation of staff. This study examines how decision makers cope with staffing delays, and how their decisions affect the outcome of software projects. We report the findings of a laboratory experiment in which subjects managed a simulated software project that entailed delays in the hiring and/or assimilation of staff. The performance of the subjects was ascertained in terms of the cost incurred and time taken in completing the project. While decision makers performed poorly in the presence of delays in either hiring or assimilation, subjects who had to deal with delays in the assimilation of staff performed worse than those dealing with hiring delays. Subjects who had to contend with both hiring and assimilation delays performed considerably worse than those who had to cope with just one type of delay. We suggest process explanations for the results, and discuss the implications of the results for managing software projects.

The task of managing software projects is universally plagued by cost and schedule overruns. A fundamental problem in software projects is the presence of unreliable information. In initial information as well as in subsequent status reports. The authors report an experiment that investigates decision making in software projects as exemplars of complex, dynamic environments reactive to the actions of the decision maker. The experiment shows that in coping with unreliable information in such environments, decision makers are susceptible to self-fulfilling prophesies created by the environment, and are prone to demonstrate conservatism. A process tracing extension of the experiment shows that subjects demonstrate a low capacity for handling complexity. The implications of the results for managing software projects and for research in dynamic decision making are discussed.

Software project management is becoming an increasingly critical task in many organizations. While the macro-level aspects of project planning and control have been addressed extensively, there is a serious lack of research on the micro-empirical analysis of individual decision making behavior. The heuristics deployed to cope with the problems of poor estimation and poor visibility that hamper software project planning and control are investigated, and the implications for software project management are examined. A laboratory experiment in which subjects managed a simulated software development project is reviewed. The subjects were given project status information at different stages of the lifecycle and had to assess software productivity in order to dynamically readjust project plans. A conservative anchoring and adjustment heuristic is shown to explain the subjects' decisions quite well. Implications for software project planning and control are presented.>

The author focuses on the dynamics of software project staffing throughout the software-development lifecycle. The research vehicle is a comprehensive system-dynamics model of the software-development process. A detailed discussion of the model's structure as well as its behavior is provided. The results of a case study in which the model is used to simulate the staffing practices of an actual software project are then presented. The experiment produces some interesting insights into the policies (both explicit and implicit) for managing the human resource, and their impact on project behavior. The decision-support capability of the model to answer what-if questions is also demonstrated. In particular, the model is used to test the degree of interchangeability of men and months on the particular software project.>