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Software Project Management

Vladan Devedzic

FON - School of Business Administration, University of Belgrade, Yugoslavia

In order to organize and manage a software development project successfully,

one must combine specific knowledge, skills, efforts, experience, capabilities,

and even intuition. They are all necessary in order to be able answer questions

such as: What artifacts to manage and control during software development?

How to organize the development team? What are the indicators and measures

of the product's quality? How to employ a certain set of development practices?

How to transition a software development organization to a new modeling

and/or development paradigm? How to create and maintain a good relationship

with the customers and end-users? What remedial actions to take when

something goes wrong in the course of the project? What are the heuristics that

can help managers in conducting the software development process?

The manager of a software development project should answer the above

questions in the context of the project itself. However, there is a vast amount of

knowledge the manager should possess that transcends the boundaries of any

specific project.

The purpose of this chapter is to provide an extended overview of many

important issues around which such knowledge should be structured. The

introductory section merely introduces the issues and the context within which

the other sections discuss them. Each of the remaining sections covers one of the

issues in more detail. The idea has been to provide a balanced coverage of the

issues from both the manager's and the developer's perspectives.

Keywords. Software development process, management practices, metrics,

organizational aspects, standards.

Introduction

Software development is a complex process involving such activities as domain

analysis, requirements specification, communication with the customers and

end-users, designing and producing different artifacts, adopting new paradigms

and technologies, evaluating and testing software products, installing and

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2 Handbook on Software Engineering & Knowledge Engineering

maintaining the application at the end-user's site, providing customer support,

organizing end-user's training, envisioning potential upgrades and negotiating

about them with the customers, and many more.

In order to keep everything under control, eliminate delays, always stay

within the budget, and prevent project runaways, i.e. situations in which cost and

time exceed what was planned, software project managers must exercise control

and guidance over the development team throughout the project's lifecycle

[Ahituv et al., 1999]. In doing so, they apply a number of tools of both economic

and managerial nature. The first category of tools includes budgeting, periodic

budget monitoring, user chargeback mechanism, continuous cost/benefit

analysis, and budget deviation analysis. The managerial toolbox includes both

long-range and short-term planning, schedule monitoring, feasibility analysis,

software quality assurance, organizing project steering committees, and the like.

All of these activities and tools help manage a number of important issues in

the process of software development. Figure 1 illustrates some of the issues, but

definitely not all of them. The issues shown in Figure 1 have been selected for

an extended overview in the remainder of this chapter based on the following

criteria:

• their priority in the concerns of most software project managers,

according to the managers themselves - this is evident from the case

studies, interviews, and reports of many software project managers and

consultants in software industry worldwide (see, for example, [Booch,

1995], [Fayad et al., 1996], and [Woodward, 1999]);

• the frequency of their appearing as topics in the relevant, industry-

oriented software engineering journals and magazines, such as IEEE

Computer, IEEE Software, and Communications of the ACM, during the

last decade;

• their importance as identified by relevant committees, associations, and

consortia of software developers (see, for example, [SWEBOK, 2000]).