TITLE: Search-Based Software Project Staffing: Challenges, Solutions, Promises, and Limitations

ABSTRACT:
Allocating resources to a software project and assigning tasks to teams constitute crucial activities that affect project cost and completion time.  Finding a solution for such a problem is NP-hard; this requires managers to be supported by proper tools in performing such an allocation. Moreover, when staffing software projects factors such as communication overhead and project training must be taken into account.

This talk overviews challenges, solutions and limitations in applying search-based optimization techniques to software project management. Then, the talk points out that, to some extent, such techniques could potentially be applied to support open source projects also, where there aren't real staffing activities, however it is still necessary to deal with contributors' expertise and blocking relations/dependencies between different bugs/issues.