Modeling distributed product development processes in Small and Medium Enterprises

The literature on Small and Medium Enterprises often discusses the emergent nature of the product development processes, however; it often does not address the lack of planning tools within such organizations. We aim to fill the gap in tool support for the planning process, by developing a discrete event simulation model to compute lead times of product development projects. The developed model explicitly captures the various tasks, teams, and developers within a distributed product development setting. Furthermore, it captures the iterative nature of the product development process and specifies the contextual relationships among tasks and among developers. The model was validated on a historical data set, as well as with case data from an ongoing project with a small-sized software firm. The model has been encapsulated into a tool using an easy-to-use desktop and iPad application. This work contributes to the practice of product development by allowing managers to model distributed product development teams, individual developers with varying levels of skills and expertise, as well as analyze and optimize the impact of various product development architectures on completion schedule and cost.