In this thesis we have described the role of meetings in software development and their impact on process improvement. We have investigated some factors; which could be used to improve organization process e.g. strategic management, understanding of business and its processes, learning and evaluation of resources. A survey has been conducted with the help of a questionnaire to analyze the meeting practices in the small and medium scale software companies. A process model and a simulation have been designed to measure the impacts of meetings on the productivity of organizations which claim the utilization of agile process. The designed model is an extension of Hamid & Madnick’s process model and the simulation is a newly developed web based application that performs meeting scheduling. The application is developed with the concept of Software As A Service (SAAS) by using the Framework Symfony and programming languages PHP and MySQL.

In spite of the fact that software reliability studies have attracted great deal of attention from different disciplines in 1970s, applications of the subject have rarely been involved in the software industry. With the rise of technological advances especially in the military electronics field, reliability of software systems gained importance. In this study, a company in the defense industries is inspected for their abilities and needs regarding software reliability, and an improvement proposal with metrics measurement system is formed. A computer tool is developed for the evaluation of the performance of the improvement proposal. Results obtained via this tool indicate improved abilities in the development of reliable software products.

In this research we present one of the first actual applications of Multi Agent-Based Simulation (MABS) to the field of software process simulation modelling (SPSM). Although a few previous applications were attempted, we explain in our literature review how these failed to take full advantage of the agency paradigm. Our research resulted in a model of the software development process that integrates performance, cognition and artefact quality, for which we built a common simulation framework to implement and run MABS and System Dynamics (SD) simulators upon the same integrated models. Although it is not possible to fully verify and validate implementations and models like ours, we used a number of verification and validation techniques to increase our confidence in these. Our work is also quite unique in that it compares MABS to SD in the context of SPSM. Here, we uncovered quite interesting properties of each simulation approach and how MABS, for example, is "risk averse" when compared to SD. In our discussion section we also present a number of lessons learned regarding the two simulation paradigms as well as various shortcomings in the models we adopted and our own.