¹Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Khalifa University, UAE.
²Centre for Smart Energy Solutions, University of Southern Denmark, Denmark

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Abstract—Despite several attempts to accurately predict duration and cost of software projects, initial plans still do not reflect real-life situations. Since commitments with customers are usually decided based on these initial plans, software companies frequently fail to deliver on time and many projects overrun both their budget and time. To improve the quality of initial project plans, we show in this paper the importance of (1) reflecting features’ priorities/risk in task schedules and (2) considering uncertainties related to human factors in plan schedules. To make simulation tasks reflect features’ priority as well as multimodal team allocation, enhanced project schedules (EPS), where remedial actions scenarios (RAS) are added, were introduced. They reflect potential schedule modifications in case of uncertainties and promote a dynamic sequencing of involved tasks rather than the static conventional way of modeling schedules. This paper describes a methodology to introduce EPS models in the development of project plans. Our case study findings show clearly the ability of the EPS model to anticipate delays due to human factors and to predict remedial scenarios to adjust to such delays. By comparing EPS to classical schedules, EPS simulation provides more accurate results with regards to project goals. These instructions give you guidelines for preparing papers for Journal of Software (JSW). Use this document as a template if you are using Microsoft Word 6.0 or later. Otherwise, use this document as an instruction set. The electronic file of your paper will be formatted further at Journal of Software. Define all symbols used in the abstract. Do not cite references in the abstract. Do not delete the blank line immediately above the abstract; it sets the footnote at the bottom of this column.

Index Terms—Human resources allocation uncertainty, feature priority/risk, dynamic project schedule, simulation.

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Cite: Rabeb Mizouni, Sanja Lazarova-Molnar, "Project Schedule Simulation: Incorporating Human Factors’ Uncertainty and Features’ Priority in Task Modeling," Journal of Software vol. 10, no. 8, pp. 939-960, 2015.