An Optimization-based Approach to Software Development Process Tailoring

A major activity performed by the manager before starting a software project is tailoring its development process. Such activity requires information about the context under which the project will be executed, including organizational, project, and team characteristics. In addition, it also requires pondering many factors and evaluating all existing constraints. In this scenario, we claim that a balance between collaboration and discipline can be the drivers to tailor software development processes in order to meet project and organization needs. With the purpose of facilitating this balancing, it is possible to automate some of the steps to solve the problem, reducing the effort required to execute this task and improving the obtained process. Therefore, this work presents an optimization-based approach where the balancing in process tailoring is defined, modeled and briefly analyzed. This approach uses collaboration and discipline as utility functions to select the most appropriate process for a software development project, considering its current context.