Häberlein, Tobias

Understanding Software Acquisition Through Modeling and Simulation

Since more than 40 years, the computer science community investigates softwaredevelopment processes. Although there are nearly as many projectsacquiring software from third parties than projects developing softwareby themselves, there hardly any investigations dealing with software acquisition.Many software acquisition projects fail. The reason is often the underestimationof their complexity: not only the work of the project's staff has to be coordinatedbut also the more sumptuous inter-project coordination has to be performed.Goal of this work is to develop a better understanding of software acquisitionprocesses. Appropriate process modeling and simulation techniques are investigatedwhich support this understanding. We use both established techniques like modelingand simulation with System Dynamics and techniques which are newly developed withinthe framework of this dissertation like the process modeling architecture GARP andprocess-oriented interactive simulation.