PROJECT SCHEDULING IN A DISTRIBUTED ENVIRONMENT CONSIDERING EMPLOYEES' WORKING HOURS

Abstract

In recent years, distributed software development has gained significant popularity, enabling companies to enhance productivity by leveraging global resources while simultaneously reducing production costs and time-to-market. However, this organizational model presents management with distinct challenges. One such challenge lies in the complexity of scheduling tasks in a remote, distributed environment. In addition to the traditional factors considered in co-located settings, managers must now account for the diverse working hours and time zones of geographically dispersed team members. Although numerous scheduling techniques have been developed in recent decades, limited research has focused on scheduling in relation to employees' working hours. This research aims to develop a novel scheduling approach that incorporates employee calendar constraints and provides valuable insights for project managers, particularly those operating in remote, distributed environments. The proposed methodology encompasses the development of a new algorithmic approach to produce an optimal project schedule that accounts for employee working hours. Comparative analysis against classical two-phase calendarization method and co-located setups showed the potential to reduce overall project duration by 6% and demonstrates particular efficiency in projects characterized by high task graph complexity. In addition, experiments showed that scheduling with consideration of working hours is even more effective when the time zone difference between subteams is approximately 8 hours, aligning with the typical employee workday. In the future, the proposed technique can be further refined by considering additional factors and constraints in the resource allocation process, specifically the need for synchronization between engineers working in different time zones.