FSE Module 9 - Software Project Management

CSEB233 Fundamental of SE ,  Module 9 Software Project Management.

 

Building computer software is complex, particularly if it involves many people working over a relatively long time.

 

Effective software project management focuses on the four P’s:

• People — the most important element of a successful project
• Product — the software to be built
• Process — the set of framework activities and software engineering tasks to get the job done
• Project — all work required to make the product a reality

People-CMM maturity model defines key practice areas like staffing, communication and coordination, work environment, training, career development, team/ culture development and others.

By definition, stakeholders are those who are impacted by (or have an impact on) the project.

Example:

• Senior managers who define the business issues that often have significant influence on the project.
• Project (technical) managers who must plan, motivate, organize, and control the practitioners who do software work.
• Practitioners who deliver the technical skills that are necessary to engineer a product or application.
• Customers who specify the requirements for the software to be engineered and other stakeholders who have a peripheral interest in the outcome.
• End-users who interact with the software once it is released for production use.

The MOI Model of leadership:

• Motivation - the ability to encourage (by “push or pull”) technical people to produce to their best ability.
• Organization - the ability to mold existing processes (or invent new ones) that will enable the initial concept to be translated into a final product.
• Ideas or innovation - he ability to encourage people to create and feel creative even when they must work within bounds established for a particular software product or application.

Efective project manager

• Problem solving - can diagnose relevant technical and organizational issues, systematically structure a solution or motivate others to develop the solution, apply lesson learns from past projects to new situation and many others.
• Managerial identity – a good manager must take charge of the project.
• Achievement – reward initiative and accomplishment to optimize the team productivity.
• Influence and team building – able to ‘read’ people, understand verbal and nonverbal signal and react to the needs of the people sending the signals.

Factors when selecting a software project team structure:

• the difficulty of the problem to be solved
• the size of the resultant program(s) in lines of code or function points
• the degree to which the problem can be modularized
• the rigidity of the delivery date

Software projects get into trouble because of reasons such as:

• Scale- the scale of many development efforts is large, leading to complexity, confusion, and significant difficulties in coordinating team members.
• Uncertainty- resulting in a continuing stream of changes

Factors that you need to look at when choosing the process model:

• The customers who have requested the product and the people who will do the work
• The characteristics of the product itself
• The project environment in which the software team works

How does a manager act to avoid problems discussed before?

• Track progress
• Make smart decisions.
• Conduct a postmortem analysis.

 

Critical Practices

• Defect tracking.
• Earned value tracking
• People aware management

 

Topic that should not be included :
Basically, under the four P’s of effective project management, process and project is not important as we are had gone through these topics before in the previous chapters.

 

Suggestion:
Do mind-mapped for this particular chapter because we need to remember a lot of key points. By doing that, I think we can remember those key words more efficiently.

 

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IS085696