dev_abms

Agent Based Modelling System of software development process

Agents

Developer

Developer agent has the following properties:

• id unique identifier of developer
• experience developer experience in interval [0.1 .. 1] (highest value means highest experience level)
• state developer's state, can be one of the following values:
  • busy developer is working at task
  • idle developer is not working at any task or resting
  • rest developer has a timeout between tasks
• task the task developer is working at now
• timeout time left to complete task/rest
• idleTimeTotal accumulates total idle time (includes rest time)
• restTimeTotal accumulates total rest time
• doneTasks accumulates done tasks

When create new developer agent it's possible to set experience or let the system automatically generate it. Normal distribution law is used to generate random experience value on interval [0.1 .. 1]

After developer finished task he should have some timeout to rest. Resting timeout is a random value with normal distribution on interval [1 .. 60] with mean 20 minutes

Working timeout is calculated by the following formula:

T = (td / de + r) * 60

where

• td task difficulty
• de developer experience
• r random value on interval [-0.5 .. 1.5]

Task

Task agent has the following properties:

• id unique identifier of task
• difficulty task difficulty in interval [1 .. 10] (highest value means highest difficulty level)
• type there are two types of tasks in the system:
  • bug with probability 0.6
  • feature with probability 0.4
• priority with value in interval [0.1 .. 1] (highest value means highest level of priority), random value with normal distribution
• created timestamp of task creation

Environments

There are two environments available in the system:

• waterfall
• agile

Every step of simulation process represents one minute of real world. On every step the system looks for idle developers and assign new task (with highest priority) to them. Every 8 to 20 hours system will generate new tasks.
Amount of generated tasks is a random value with normal distribution in interval [5 .. 20] tasks. The only difference between agile and waterfall environments is that in agile new tasks become available to idle developers as soon as created.
In waterfall environment generated tasks added first to TODO pool (scheduling pool) and then only after 80 hours (10 days) become available to idle developers.

List of generated random values

• developer experience
• estimate work time at task
• estimate rest time
• task difficulty
• task type distribution
• task priority
• new task generation time
• amount of generated tasks

Usage

Execute the following command to install required dependencies

# npm i

As soon as dependencies installed you can run the following command to start modelling

# npm start <environment>

TODO

• Assign tasks by priority and created timestamp
• Add CLI options
  • to turn on/off debug mode
  • to set custom task types probability values
  • to set simulation step amount
  • to set tasks pool capacity
  • to set developers pool capacity
• Add CLI help
• Add unit tests