Project Management

• involves the planning, monitoring, and control of people, process, and events that occur during software development
• focus on the fours P's to be successful
  
  
  
  
• What does project management involve?
  • People
    • recruiting & selection
    • performance management
    • training
    • compensation
    • career development
    • organization
    • work design
    • team/culture development
  • Product
    • product objectives
    • scope
    • alternative solutions
    • constraint tradeoffs
  • Process - framework activities populated with
    • tasks
    • milestones
    • work products
    • QA points
  • Project
    • planning
    • monitoring
    • controlling
      

The People

• Structure of the software team
  • Closed paradigm
    • top level problem solving and internal coordination managed by team leader
    • good for projects that repeat past efforts
  • Random paradigm
    • team loosely structured
    • success depends on initiative of individual team members
    • paradigm excels when innovation and technical breakthroughs required
  • Open paradigm
    • rotating task coordinators and group consensus
    • good for solving complex problems
    • not always efficient as other paradigms
  • Synchronous paradigm
    • relies on natural problem compartmentalization
    • team organized to require little active communication with each other

  
  

• Avoid Toxic Team environments
  • frenzied work atmosphere where team members waste energy and lose focus on work objectives
  • high frustration and group friction caused by personal, business, or technological problems
  • fragmented or poorly coordinated procedures or improperly chosen process model blocks accomplishments
  • unclear role definition that results in lack of accountability or finger pointing
  • repeated exposure to failure that leads to loss of confidence and lower morale
    
    
• Agile Teams
  • teams have significant autonomy to make their own project management and technical decisions
  • planning is kept to a minimum
  • team self-organizes as project proceeds to maximize contributions of each individual's talents
  • may conduct daily (10 - 20 minute) meeting to synchronize and coordinate each day's work
    • What has been accomplished since the last meeting?
    • What needs to be accomplished by the next meeting?
    • How will each team member contribute to accomplishing what needs to be done?
    • What roadblocks exist that have to be overcome?

The Product

The Process

• process model chosen must be appropriate for
  • customers and developers
  • characteristics of the product
  • project development environment

• project planning begins with melding the product and the process
  
  
  • here is one approach - example for a project to develop a word processor
    
    
    
  • each function to be engineered must pass through the set of framework activities
  • work tasks may vary but the common process framework is invariant
  • the job of the software engineer is to estimate the resources required to move each function through the framework activities
  • project decomposition begins when the project manager tries to determine how to accomplish each framework activity

The Project

• tips on how to start off right and stay on track
• signs the project is in trouble
• be sure to read the chapter!

Notes and figures from:

• Software Engineering: A Practitioner's Approach, 6th Edition, by Roger S Pressman, R.S. Pressman & Associates, McGraw-Hill, 2005