  A novel modeling framework is proposed for dynamic scheduling of projects and
workforce assignment in open source software development (OSSD). The goal is to
help project managers in OSSD distribute workforce to multiple projects to
achieve high efficiency in software development (e.g. high workforce
utilization and short development time) while ensuring the quality of
deliverables (e.g. code modularity and software security). The proposed
framework consists of two models: 1) a system dynamic model coupled with a
meta-heuristic to obtain an optimal schedule of software development projects
considering their attributes (e.g. priority, effort, duration) and 2) an agent
based model to represent the development community as a social network, where
development managers form an optimal team for each project and balance the
workload among multiple scheduled projects based on the optimal schedule
obtained from the system dynamic model. To illustrate the proposed framework, a
software enhancement request process in Kuali foundation is used as a case
study. Survey data collected from the Kuali development managers, project
managers and actual historical enhancement requests have been used to construct
the proposed models. Extensive experiments are conducted to demonstrate the
impact of varying parameters on the considered efficiency and quality.
