ProjectION: A computational intelligence-based tool for decision support in agile software development projects

Abstract

The growing complexity of software development has caused project management techniques to shift towards agile methodologies, which are usually supported by software tools that help planning and reporting. However, most popular tools are fairly simple in terms of decision support. In this work, we aim to implement a software tool that supports the decision maker in agile project management by means of computational intelligence-based methods. We have analyzed the needs in an agile project, and designed and implemented a software solution named ProjectION. The tool has been made public and evaluated with real users, obtaining positive feedback that indicates it is of interest for experienced managers and software engineers. ProjectION solves the most common needs in agile-managed projects. It provides an intuitive user interface that supports the decision maker in managing and reporting project status, forecasting expected progress, and automatically planning software releases solving the well-known Next Release Problem. Used algorithms and the execution service have been made available to the community in order to enable future integrations of other researchers’ approaches to the Next Release Problem.