Title: Investigating the effect of variability in product development life cycle

Authors: Riham Khalil; Dave Stockton; Mohamed Sultani Alkaabi; Lawrence Mukhongo Manyonge

Addresses: Homeodynamic Autonomy Limited, High Street, Lutterworth, Leicestershire, LE17 4AD, UK ' Homeodynamic Autonomy Limited, High Street, Lutterworth, Leicestershire, LE17 4AD, UK ' UAE Government, P.O. Box 220043, Alain City, UAE ' Technical University of Mombasa, P.O. Box 90420 - 80100, Mombasa, Kenya

Abstract: Projects have evidently become the core activity in most companies and organisations where they are investing significant amount of resources in different types of projects such as building new services, process improvement, etc. This research focuses on service sector in an attempt to improving project management planning and control activities. The paper investigates the planning and control of software development projects by analysing existing software development models, identifying best practices from these models so as to develop a model for improving software development tasks. The research extends the existing planning and control approaches by considering uncertainty in customer requirements, resource flexibility and risks level variability. A novel approach introduced within this research through the integration of simulation modelling techniques with Taguchi analysis to investigate 'what if' project scenarios. This paper has adopted the concept of Quality Function Deployment in the development of the model, where optimisation routines have been adopted.

Keywords: project management; software development projects; quality function deployment; QFD; operations management; variability effect; product development life cycle; project control; project planning; uncertainty; customer requirements; resource flexibility; risk; simulation; modelling; Taguchi methods.

DOI: 10.1504/IJPD.2015.073521

International Journal of Product Development, 2015 Vol.20 No.6, pp.495 - 513

Accepted: 19 Jul 2014
Published online: 11 Dec 2015 *

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