An Efficient DFS Algorithm to Compute Least Longest Schedule Path of Software Projects

The requirements of the ensuing software provided by the client are studied by software developers before the preparation of the project charter. The schedule, cost and person-days estimation are made by the developer using an activity chart. This activity chart is transformed into the graphical form using standard semiotics then manually the critical path, i.e. least long path from start to end is identified. This procedure may have several shortfalls (i) Time-consuming (ii) Manual process. In addition to this, a manual process is an error-prone approach. When the number of activities is increased, the determination of the critical path is a herculean task. In such a case, there is quintessence to develop an automated methodology that determines the critical path. This paper contains a proposed automated methodology for the determination of the critical path through a modified depth-first search (DFS) algorithm. Instead of activity chart representation, we have transformed the tabular information of dependencies and time taken by each activity into n × n matrix form and then developed an algorithm to compute critical path it takes time complexity of O(n2).