Agile Planning and Tracking of Software Projects Using the State-Space Approach

All projects are required to be tracked and reported their status information to the management for controlling their execution, and have limited resources in terms of budget and time, so agile projects are. Their tracking is an overhead for the software projects as the tracking is a management activity, not a technical one, for the development of the software product. Various tracking techniques have been developed for tracking of agile projects. We have classified them as heavy-weight and light-weight, in terms of the information maintained, or not, about which phase of the project lifecycle a partially completed task belongs to. Light-weight techniques consider the tasks which have been completed but do not consider the partially completed tasks; while heavy-weight ones consider the tasks which have been completed as well as the state information about which phase of the project lifecycle the partially completed tasks belong to. Light-weight techniques are not effective due to not considering the partially completed tasks and heavy-weight ones are not utilizing the resources efficiently. In this paper, a light-weight tracking technique is designed using the state-space approach, which considers both the completed tasks and the partially completed tasks but without maintaining the state information for the partially completed tasks in order to tracking the projects effectively and utilizing the resources efficiently. The application of the technique, using Monte-Carlo simulation, is demonstrated by tracking a project which was carried out with the agile software development philosophy.