A Study of Staff Turnover, Acquisition, and Assimilation and Their Impact on Software Development Cost and Schedule

Abstract:In this article we investigate how staff turnover, acquisition, and assimilation rates affect software development cost and schedule. A system dynamics model of the software development process is employed as our experimentation vehicle. In addition to permitting less costly and less time-consuming experimentation, simulation-type models can provide useful insights into the causes behind the different behavior patterns observed. Our results indicate that staff turnover, acquisition, and assimilation rates can increase a project’s cost and duration by as much as 40 to 60 percent. This suggests that the three staffing variables are indeed critical for the successful development of software systems, as well as for the accurate estimation of software development cost and schedule.Key Words and Phrases: Software developmenthuman resource managementproject staffingsoftware project managementsoftware development cost and schedule Additional informationNotes on contributorsTarek K. Abdel-HamidTarek K. Abdel-Hamid received his B.Sc. in aeronautical engineering from Cairo University, Cairo, Egypt, and his Ph.D. in Management Information Systems from MIT. He is Assistant Professor of Information Sciences at the Dept. of Administrative Sciences of the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, CA. Prior to joining NPS, he was a senior consultant at the Stanford Research Institute. His research interests are software project management, system dynamics, expert simulators, and management information systems. He has authored or coauthored more than 20 papers and technical reports; his papers have appeared in Communications of the ACM, Journal of Systems and Software, MIS Quarterly, and IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering. He is also coauthor of a forthcoming book on software project management.