Analogy based prediction of work item flow in software projects: a case study

A software development project coordinates work by using work items that represent customer, tester and developer found defects, enhancements, and new features. We set out to facilitate software project planning by modeling the flow of such work items and using information on historic projects to predict the work flow of an ongoing project. The history of the work items is extracted from problem tracking or configuration management databases. The Web-based prediction tool allows project managers to select relevant past projects and adjust the prediction based on staffing, type, and schedule of the ongoing project. We present the workflow model, and briefly describe project prediction of a large software project for customer relationship management (CRM).