Investigating the Gap between Quantitative and Qualitative/Semi-quantitative Software Process Simulation Models: An Explorative Study

Software Process Simulation Modeling (SPSM) research has increased in the past two decades. However, most of process models for simulation are quantitative, which require detailed understanding and accurate measurement. As the follow-up work to the previous studies in qualitative/semi-quantitative modeling of software process, this paper aims to investigate the equivalence and gap between quantitative and qualitative/semi-quantitative process modeling, to compare the characteristics and performance of these approaches by modeling and simulating a software evolution process, and further to establish the substantial linkage between them. Following the enhanced model conversion scheme developed in this paper, the reference quantitative continuous model and its counterpart models become comparable. The results present their different capabilities and interesting perspectives.