Software Process Simulation Modeling: Facts, Trends and Directions

Software process simulation modeling (SPSM) research has increased since the first ProSim workshop held in 1998 and Kellner, Madachy and Raffo (KMR) discussed the "why, what and how" of process simulation. This paper aims to assess how SPSM has evolved during the past 10 years in particular whether the reasons for SPSM, the simulation paradigms, tools, problem domains, and model scopes have changed. We performed a systematic literature review of software process simulation papers from the ProSim series publications in the last decade. We identified 96 studies from the sources and included them in this review. The papers were categorized into four major types and data needed to address each research question was extracted. We found a need for refining the reasons and the classification scheme for SPSM introduced by KMR. More emerging SPSM paradigms and model scopes were added to enhance KMR's discussion. Trends over time showed that interest in continuous modeling was decreasing and interest in micro-processes was increasing. Hybrid models were based primarily on system dynamics and discrete event simulation and were all implemented by vertical integration. We recommend SPSM research concentrate more on recent software processes and on making SPSM more reusable and thus easier to build.