A Systematic Methodology for Developing Discrete Event Simulation Models of Software Development Processes

Abstract: So far there have been several efforts for developing software process simulators. However, the approaches for developing the simulators seem to have been ad-hoc and no systematic methodology exists. Since modeling and simulation in support of software development should become more popular (and there are signs that it does), there is a need for migrating modeling from craft to engineering. This article proposes such a systematic method, focused on the development of discrete simulation-based decision models, but extensible to other modeling approaches as well.