Understanding Software Acquisition Through Modeling and Simulation

Since more than 40 years, the computer science community investigates software
development processes. Although there are nearly as many projects
acquiring software from third parties than projects developing software
by themselves, there hardly any investigations dealing with software acquisition.

Many software acquisition projects fail. The reason is often the underestimation
of their complexity: not only the work of the project's staff has to be coordinated
but also the more sumptuous inter-project coordination has to be performed.
Goal of this work is to develop a better understanding of software acquisition
processes. Appropriate process modeling and simulation techniques are investigated
which support this understanding. We use both established techniques like modeling
and simulation with System Dynamics and techniques which are newly developed within
the framework of this dissertation like the process modeling architecture GARP and
process-oriented interactive simulation.