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Evolving process simulators by using validated learning

Software process simulation has been evolved towards a mature technology for analyzing the behavior of software processes: Methods for systematically developing simulators exist, tools for modeling and execution are available, models for nearly all kinds of processes have been created, and empirical evidence on the accuracy of many models has been gathered. However, software process simulation is still waiting for a breakthrough success. Although simulation is a technology that has been successfully established in many domains, software process simulation is not widely used in software engineering practice. Should we pivot or persevere? This article argues that it is necessary to use a rigorous approach for discovering “customers” of process simulators and finding out what they consider to be value. One mechanism to do this is to apply so-called “validated learning”, i.e., to apply an actionable learning approach to identify what is relevant and what is irrelevant by systematically testing value hypotheses. Doing this promises that simulation efforts can be concentrated on value-creation and that wrong avenues can be avoided. Besides this, the article sketched prerequisites and lessons learned that need to be considered when applying simulators in practice as well as upcoming opportunities for making software process simulation a success.