Software Project Management

Software Project Management

Software Project Management

Introduction

Project management (PM) refers to the management and control of projects and temporary organizations. Generally speaking, managing a project concerns a task to be completed with a limited set of resources—be it personnel, material, or financial resources—and within a certain period. Making decisions about software processes is challenging. Each member of a project may have a different opinion as to the best way to improve the development process for their project even if project members are aware of best practices. In recent work, Raffo developed the process tradeoff analysis (PTA) method. This method builds on previous work by Kellner et al. at the Software Engineering Institute (SEI) , and by developing a quantitative approach for evaluating potential process changes in terms of development cost, product quality, and project schedule and . This work has predominately been applied to the software project management planning function and which is one of six major applications of process simulation as described in Kellner, Madachy and Raffo .

The goal of this current research is to develop a 'forward-looking' approach that supports the software project management control function. We call it the PROMPT method ( PROject Management of Process Tradeoffs).

PROMPT integrates timely metrics data with rapidly deployable simulation models of the software development process. By utilizing up-to-date project data, the simulation model becomes a project management tool that can predict likely project outcomes with greater and greater certainty as the project progresses.

Using PROMPT, tradeoffs among performance measures (e.g. cost, quality, and schedule) are accomplished using outcome based control limits (OBCLs) augmented by multi-criteria utility functions and financial measures of performance (e.g. net present value, payback period, etc.) of various process alternatives as compared with a baseline.

By combining metrics and predictive models, a more comprehensive performance picture of the project is achieved than by using metrics alone. Moreover, the predictive models can support managers as they attempt to re-plan to bring a project back on track. In this paper, the focus is to illustrate how process tradeoffs are made in the context of the PROMPT framework. To do this, we provide an overview of PROMPT by setting it in the context of Demming's PLAN-DO-STUDY-ACT cycle for process improvement and . We then present a real-world example showing the use of PROMPT(Raffo 2000).

Software Project Management

The abundance of projects in today's industry and business life has given rise to much interest in PM. And some commentators argue that the use of the project form of organization is still on the increase so that there is continually an ongoing projectization in society as a whole. Many activities are defined as projects and organized as time-limited efforts. One implication of this is that a growing number of people are involved in PM and some of them even have the title project manager or consider themselves to be project managers. This proliferation of projects is paralleled by the availability of practical handbooks in the area. So even if project manager is not an officially recognized profession, ...