Software project management - AbsoluteAstronomy.com

Software project management is the art and science of planning and leading software projects. It is a sub-discipline of project management

Project management

Project management is the discipline of planning, organizing, securing, and managing resources to achieve specific goals. A project is a temporary endeavor with a defined beginning and end , undertaken to meet unique goals and objectives, typically to bring about beneficial change or added value...

in which software projects are planned, monitored and controlled.

History

The history of software project management is closely related to the history of software. Software was developed for dedicated purposes for dedicated machines until the concept of object-oriented programming

Object-oriented programming

Object-oriented programming is a programming paradigm using "objects" – data structures consisting of data fields and methods together with their interactions – to design applications and computer programs. Programming techniques may include features such as data abstraction,...

began to become popular in the 1960s, making repeatable solutions possible for the software industry. Dedicated systems could be adapted to other uses thanks to component-based software engineering

Component-based software engineering

Component-based software engineering is a branch of software engineering that emphasizes the separation of concerns in respect of the wide-ranging functionality available throughout a given software system...

. Companies quickly understood the relative ease of use that software programming had over hardware circuitry, and the software industry grew very quickly in the 1970s and 1980s. To manage new development efforts, companies applied proven project management methods, but project schedules slipped during test runs, especially when confusion occurred in the gray zone between the user specifications and the delivered software. To be able to avoid these problems, software project management methods focused on matching user requirements to delivered products, in a method known now as the waterfall model

Waterfall model

The waterfall model is a sequential design process, often used in software development processes, in which progress is seen as flowing steadily downwards through the phases of Conception, Initiation, Analysis, Design, Construction, Testing, Production/Implementation and Maintenance.The waterfall...

. Since then, analysis of software project management failures has shown that the following are the most common causes:

Unrealistic or unarticulated project goals
Inaccurate estimates of needed resources
Badly defined system requirements
Poor reporting of the project's status
Unmanaged risks
Poor communication among customers, developers, and users
Use of immature technology
Inability to handle the project's complexity
Sloppy development practices
Poor project management
Stakeholder politics
Commercial pressures

The first three items in the list above show the difficulties articulating the needs of the client in such a way that proper resources can deliver the proper project goals. Specific software project management tools are useful and often necessary, but the true art in software project management is applying the correct method and then using tools to support the method. Without a method, tools are worthless. Since the 1960s, several proprietary software project management methods have been developed by software manufacturers for their own use, while computer consulting firms have also developed similar methods for their clients. Today software project management methods are still evolving, but the current trend leads away from the waterfall model to a more cyclic project delivery model that imitates a Software release life cycle.

Software development process

A software development process

Software development process

A software development process, also known as a software development life cycle , is a structure imposed on the development of a software product. Similar terms include software life cycle and software process. It is often considered a subset of systems development life cycle...

is concerned primarily with the production aspect of software development

Software development

Software development is the development of a software product...

, as opposed to the technical aspect, such as software tools. These processes exist primarily for supporting the management of software development, and are generally skewed toward addressing business concerns. Many software development processes can be run in a similar way to general project management processes. Examples are:

Risk management
Risk management
Risk management is the identification, assessment, and prioritization of risks followed by coordinated and economical application of resources to minimize, monitor, and control the probability and/or impact of unfortunate events or to maximize the realization of opportunities...

is the process of measuring or assessing risk
Risk assessment
Risk assessment is a step in a risk management procedure. Risk assessment is the determination of quantitative or qualitative value of risk related to a concrete situation and a recognized threat...

and then developing strategies to manage the risk. In general, the strategies employed include transferring the risk to another party, avoiding the risk, reducing the negative effect of the risk, and accepting some or all of the consequences of a particular risk. Risk management in software project management begins with the business case
Business case
A business case captures the reasoning for initiating a project or task. It is often presented in a well-structured written document, but may also sometimes come in the form of a short verbal argument or presentation. The logic of the business case is that, whenever resources such as money or...

for starting the project, which includes a cost-benefit analysis
Cost-benefit analysis
Cost–benefit analysis , sometimes called benefit–cost analysis , is a systematic process for calculating and comparing benefits and costs of a project for two purposes: to determine if it is a sound investment , to see how it compares with alternate projects...

as well as a list of fallback options for project failure, called a contingency plan
Contingency plan
A contingency plan is a plan devised for an exceptional risk which is impractical or impossible to avoid. Contingency plans are often devised by governments or businesses who want to be prepared for events which, while highly unlikely, may have catastrophic effects. For example, suppose many...

.
- A subset of risk management that is gaining more and more attention is Opportunity Management, which means the same thing, except that the potential risk outcome will have a positive, rather than a negative impact. Though theoretically handled in the same way, using the term "opportunity" rather than the somewhat negative term "risk" helps to keep a team focused on possible positive outcomes of any given risk register
  Risk register
  A Risk Register is a Risk Management tool commonly used in Project Management and organisational risk assessments. It acts as a central repository for all risks identified by the project or organisation and, for each risk, includes information such as risk probability, impact, counter-measures,...
  
  in their projects, such as spin-off projects, windfalls, and free extra resources.
Requirements management
Requirements management
Requirements management is the process of documenting, analyzing, tracing, prioritizing and agreeing on requirements and then controlling change and communicating to relevant stakeholders. It is a continuous process throughout a project...

is the process of identifying, eliciting
Requirements elicitation
In requirements engineering, requirements elicitation is the practice of obtaining the requirements of a system from users, customers and other stakeholders...

, documenting, analyzing, tracing
Requirements traceability
Requirements traceability is a sub-discipline of requirements management within software development and systems engineering. Requirements traceability is concerned with documenting the life of a requirement and to provide bi-directional traceability between various associated requirements...

, prioritizing and agreeing on requirements and then controlling change and communicating to relevant stakeholders. New or altered computer system Requirements management, which includes Requirements analysis
Requirements analysis
Requirements analysis in systems engineering and software engineering, encompasses those tasks that go into determining the needs or conditions to meet for a new or altered product, taking account of the possibly conflicting requirements of the various stakeholders, such as beneficiaries or users...

, is an important part of the software engineering
Software engineering
Software Engineering is the application of a systematic, disciplined, quantifiable approach to the development, operation, and maintenance of software, and the study of these approaches; that is, the application of engineering to software...

process; whereby business analysts or software developers identify the needs or requirements of a client; having identified these requirements they are then in a position to design a solution.
Change management
Change management
Change management is a structured approach to shifting/transitioning individuals, teams, and organizations from a current state to a desired future state. It is an organizational process aimed at helping employees to accept and embrace changes in their current business environment....

is the process of identifying, documenting, analyzing, prioritizing and agreeing on changes to scope (project management)
Scope (project management)
In project management, the term scope has two distinct uses: Project Scope and Product Scope.Project Scope"The work that needs to be accomplished to deliver a product, service, or result with the specified features and functions."Product Scope...

and then controlling changes and communicating to relevant stakeholders. Change impact analysis
Change impact analysis
Change impact analysis is defined by Bohner and Arnold as "identifying the potential consequences of a change, or estimating what needs to be modified to accomplish a change", and they focus on IA in terms of scoping changes within the details of a design...

of new or altered scope, which includes Requirements analysis
Requirements analysis
Requirements analysis in systems engineering and software engineering, encompasses those tasks that go into determining the needs or conditions to meet for a new or altered product, taking account of the possibly conflicting requirements of the various stakeholders, such as beneficiaries or users...

at the change level, is an important part of the software engineering
Software engineering
Software Engineering is the application of a systematic, disciplined, quantifiable approach to the development, operation, and maintenance of software, and the study of these approaches; that is, the application of engineering to software...

process; whereby business analysts or software developers identify the altered needs or requirements of a client; having identified these requirements they are then in a position to re-design or modify a solution. Theoretically, each change can impact the timeline and budget of a software project, and therefore by definition must include risk-benefit analysis
Risk-benefit analysis
Risk–benefit analysis is the comparison of the risk of a situation to its related benefits. Exposure to personal risk is recognized as a normal aspect of everyday life. We accept a certain level of risk in our lives as necessary to achieve certain benefits. In most of these risks we feel as though...

before approval.
Software configuration management
Software configuration management
In software engineering, software configuration management is the task of tracking and controlling changes in the software. Configuration management practices include revision control and the establishment of baselines....

is the process of identifying, and documenting the scope itself, which is the software product underway, including all sub-products and changes and enabling communication of these to relevant stakeholders. In general, the processes employed include version control, naming convention (programming), and software archival agreements.
Release management
Release management
The release management process is a relatively new but rapidly growing discipline within software engineering of managing software releases....

is the process of identifying, documenting, prioritizing and agreeing on releases of software and then controlling the release schedule and communicating to relevant stakeholders. Most software projects have access to three software environments to which software can be released; Development, Test, and Production. In very large projects, where distributed teams need to integrate their work before release to users, there will often be more environments for testing, called unit testing, system testing
System testing
System testing of software or hardware is testing conducted on a complete, integrated system to evaluate the system's compliance with its specified requirements. System testing falls within the scope of black box testing, and as such, should require no knowledge of the inner design of the code or...

, or integration testing
Integration testing
Integration testing is the phase in software testing in which individual software modules are combined and tested as a group. It occurs after unit testing and before validation testing...

, before release to User acceptance testing (UAT).
- A subset of release management that is gaining more and more attention is Data Management
  Data management
  Data management comprises all the disciplines related to managing data as a valuable resource.- Overview :The official definition provided by DAMA International, the professional organization for those in the data management profession, is: "Data Resource Management is the development and execution...
  
  , as obviously the users can only test based on data that they know, and "real" data is only in the software environment called "production". In order to test their work, programmers must therefore also often create "dummy data" or "data stubs". Traditionally, older versions of a production system were once used for this purpose, but as companies rely more and more on outside contributors for software development, company data may not be released to development teams. In complex environments, datasets may be created that are then migrated across test environments according to a test release schedule, much like the overall software release schedule.

Project planning, monitoring and control

The purpose of project planning is to identify the scope of the project, estimate

Estimation in software engineering

The ability to accurately estimate the time and/or cost taken for a project to come in to its successful conclusion is a serious problem for software engineers. The use of a repeatable, clearly defined and well understood software development process has, in recent years, shown itself to be the...

the work involved, and create a project schedule

Gantt chart

A Gantt chart is a type of bar chart that illustrates a project schedule. Gantt charts illustrate the start and finish dates of the terminal elements and summary elements of a project. Terminal elements and summary elements comprise the work breakdown structure of the project. Some Gantt charts...

. Project planning begins with requirements

Requirements analysis

Requirements analysis in systems engineering and software engineering, encompasses those tasks that go into determining the needs or conditions to meet for a new or altered product, taking account of the possibly conflicting requirements of the various stakeholders, such as beneficiaries or users...

that define the software to be developed. The project plan is then developed to describe the tasks that will lead to completion.

The purpose of project monitoring and control is to keep the team and management up to date on the project's progress. If the project deviates from the plan, then the project manager can take action to correct the problem. Project monitoring and control involves status meetings to gather status from the team. When changes need to be made, change control

Change Control

Change control within Quality management systems and Information Technology systems is a formal process used to ensure that changes to a product or system are introduced in a controlled and coordinated manner...

is used to keep the products up to date.

Issue

In computing, the term issue is a unit of work to accomplish an improvement in a system. An issue could be a bug, a requested feature, task, missing documentation

Documentation

Documentation is a term used in several different ways. Generally, documentation refers to the process of providing evidence.Modules of Documentation are Helpful...

, and so forth. The word "issue" is popularly misused in lieu of "problem

Problem

A problem is an obstacle, impediment, difficulty or challenge, or any situation that invites resolution; the resolution of which is recognized as a solution or contribution toward a known purpose or goal...

." This usage is probably related.

For example, OpenOffice.org

OpenOffice.org

OpenOffice.org, commonly known as OOo or OpenOffice, is an open-source application suite whose main components are for word processing, spreadsheets, presentations, graphics, and databases. OpenOffice is available for a number of different computer operating systems, is distributed as free software...

used to call their modified version of BugZilla

Bugzilla

Bugzilla is a Web-based general-purpose bugtracker and testing tool originally developed and used by the Mozilla project, and licensed under the Mozilla Public License....

IssueZilla. As of September 2010, they call their system Issue Tracker.

Problems occur from time to time and fixing them in a timely fashion is essential to achieve correctness of a system and avoid delayed deliveries of products.

Severity levels

Issues are often categorized in terms of severity levels. Different companies have different definitions of severities, but some of the most common ones are:

Critical
High

The bug or issue affects a crucial part of a system, and must be fixed in order for it to resume normal operation.

Medium

The bug or issue affects a minor part of a system, but has some impact on its operation. This severity level is assigned when a non-central requirement of a system is affected.

Low

The bug or issue affects a minor part of a system, and has very little impact on its operation. This severity level is assigned when a non-central requirement of a system (and with lower importance) is affected.

Cosmetic

The system works correctly, but the appearance does not match the expected one. For example: wrong colors, too much or too little spacing between contents, incorrect font sizes, typos, etc. This is the lowest severity issue.

In many software companies, issues are often investigated by Quality Assurance Analysts

Quality Assurance

Quality assurance, or QA for short, is the systematic monitoring and evaluation of the various aspects of a project, service or facility to maximize the probability that minimum standards of quality are being attained by the production process...

when they verify a system for correctness, and then assigned to the developer(s) that are responsible for resolving them. They can also be assigned by system users during the User Acceptance Testing (UAT) phase.

Issues are commonly communicated using Issue

Issue tracking system

An issue tracking system is a computer software package that manages and maintains lists of issues, as needed by an organization...

or Defect Tracking Systems. In some other cases, emails or instant messengers are used.

Philosophy

As a subdiscipline of project management, some regard the management of software development akin to the management of manufacturing

Manufacturing

Manufacturing is the use of machines, tools and labor to produce goods for use or sale. The term may refer to a range of human activity, from handicraft to high tech, but is most commonly applied to industrial production, in which raw materials are transformed into finished goods on a large scale...

, which can be performed by someone with management skills, but no programming skills. John C. Reynolds

John C. Reynolds

John C. Reynolds is an American computer scientist.John Reynolds studied at Purdue University and then earned a PhD in theoretical physics from Harvard University in 1961. He was Professor of Information science at Syracuse University from 1970 to 1986. Since then he has been Professor of Computer...

rebuts this view, and argues that software development is entirely design

Design

Design as a noun informally refers to a plan or convention for the construction of an object or a system while “to design” refers to making this plan...

work, and compares a manager

Management

Management in all business and organizational activities is the act of getting people together to accomplish desired goals and objectives using available resources efficiently and effectively...

who cannot program

Programmer

A programmer, computer programmer or coder is someone who writes computer software. The term computer programmer can refer to a specialist in one area of computer programming or to a generalist who writes code for many kinds of software. One who practices or professes a formal approach to...

to the managing editor

Managing editor

A managing editor is a senior member of a publication's management team.In the United States, a managing editor oversees and coordinates the publication's editorial activities...

of a newspaper

Newspaper

A newspaper is a scheduled publication containing news of current events, informative articles, diverse features and advertising. It usually is printed on relatively inexpensive, low-grade paper such as newsprint. By 2007, there were 6580 daily newspapers in the world selling 395 million copies a...

who cannot write.

External links

Resources on Software Project Management from Steve McConnell: http://www.construx.com/Page.aspx?nid=22
Resources on Software Project Management from Dan Galorath
Dan Galorath
Daniel D. Galorath is the President and CEO of Galorath Incorporated and the chief architect of SEER-SEM, an algorithmic project management software application...

: http://www.galorath.com/wp/category/project-management

The source of this article is wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. The text of this article is licensed under the GFDL.

History

Software development process

Project planning, monitoring and control

Issue

Severity levels

Philosophy

See also

External links