Infraestrutura para simulação de processos de software baseada em metamodelos de dinâmica de sistemas

Abstract

Better results are achieved, in projects involving software development, when the responsible manager has some previous experience in projects. However, it is impossible for educational institutions to educate their students by creating pilot projects for each student, due to problems with the time scale, costs and staff. An alternative way study problems that are difficult to handle in a real scale is doing modeling. This work presents a computational infrastructure we have built, which is general purpose regarding application domain, and developed as a basis to build applications that use modeling and simulation techniques.This infrastructure is used to study the causes and effects of the dynamics found in software development processes, taken as our field of application. The main component of this infrastructure is the library JynaCore API, which implements two languages based on System Dynamics for describing the models: stock and flow diagrams and the System Dynamics Metamodels. As proof of concept, a general purpose prototype simulator is built to perform simulations with a set of models on the software processes literature. Additionally, we present a review of alternatives that allow modeling software development processes on a computer and the theoretical bases for the two modeling languages supported by the infrastructure. The approach allows the construction of simulators, models and scenarios (variations of more general models) where the users of the tool can experiment various practical situations in simulated environments.