Tool Support for Planning Global Software Development Projects

Planning global software development (GSD) projects is a challenging task, as it involves balancing both technical and business related issues. While planning GSD projects, project managers face decision-making situations such as, choosing the right site to distribute work and finding an optimal work distribution considering both the cost and duration of the project. Finding an optimal solution for these decision-making situations is a difficult task without some kind of automated support, as there are many possible alternative work allocation solutions and each solution affects the cost and duration of project differently. To assist project managers in these situations, we propose a tool for planning GSD projects. The tool uses multi-objective genetic algorithms for finding optimal work allocation solutions in a trade off between cost and time. This article discusses the implementation of the tool and application of the tool using two scenarios.