A Simulation Model for Application Development in Data Warehouses

Software development projects have been blamed for being behind schedule, cost overruns, and the delivery of poor quality product. This paper presents a simulation model of a data warehouse to evaluate the feasibility of different software development controls and measures to better manage a software development lifecycle, and improve the performance of the launched software. This paper attempts to address the practical issue of code defects in each stage of data warehouse application development. The author has compared the defect removal rate of their previous project to the newly proposed enhanced project development life cycle that uses code inspection and code scorecard along with other phases of software development life cycle. Simulation results show that the code inspection and code score-carding have achieved a significant code defect reduction. This has also significantly improved the software development process and allowed for a flawless production execution. The author proposes this simulation model to a data warehouse application development process to enable developers to improve their current process.