Software Project Management By Deepika Chaudhary

Why Project Management  The software product is intangible  There is no standard procedure.  New software projects are not similar to older ones

Four P’s in Project Management  People  Product  Process  Project

People involved in s/w Projects  Senior Managers  Project Managers  Programmers  Customers  End Users

Qualities of project manager  Motivation  Organization  Innovation  Problem Solving  Managerial Capabilities  Leadership skills  Team Building

Software Team Structure  Democratic  Controlled Centralized  Controlled Decentralized

Democratic  The team consists of four or fewer programmers  Group leaderships rotate among group members  The structure allow input from all members which can lead to better decisions.  Well suited for long term research type projects.

Controlled centralized  A hierarchy like structure  It consist of chief programmer who is responsible of taking all types of technical decisions about the project  This kind of structure is well suited for projects with simple solutions and strict deadlines.

Controlled Decentralized  This structure tries to combine the strengths of the democratic and controlled centralized teams.  The team consist of  Project Leader  The group of senior programmers  The group of junior programmers  Suitable for large projects which are reasonably straight forward.

Factors considered when planning  The Difficulty of the program  The size of resultant program  The time that the team will stay together  The degree to which the program can be modularized  The required reliability and quality of the system  The rigidity of delivery date  The degree of communication required.

Coordination and communication  Formal impersonal :incl documents and deliverables, tech memos and various other documents  Formal interpersonal : Focus on quality assurance These incl status review meetings design and code inspection.  Informal interpersonal : includes group meetings  Electronic Communication  Interpersonal networking

Project Management Activities  Measurement and Metrics  Management activities  Project Planning  Scheduling  Tracking  Risk Management

Management Activities  Proposal Writing  Project Planning & scheduling  Project Costing  Project Monitoring and Reviews  Personnel Selection and Evaluation  Report Writing and presentations

Proposal Writing  The first stage in a software project may involve writing a proposal to carry out project.  The proposal describes the objective of the project and how it will be carried out  It usually includes cost and schedule estimates.

Project Planning  The objective of software project planning is to provide framework that enables the managers to make reasonable estimates of resources cost and schedules

The Pseudo code for project planning  Establish the project constraint  Make initial assessments of the project parameters  Define project milestones and deliverables  While project has not been completed or cancelled LOOP  Draw up project schedule  Initiates activities according to schedule  Wait for while

 Review project progress  Revise estimates of project parameters  Update the project schedule  Renegotiate Project Constraints and deliverables  If (problem arise)  Then  Initiate technical review  End if  loop

The Project Plan  The project plan sets out a resources available to the project, the work breakdown and a schedule for carrying out the work.  The project plan includes  Introduction : It describes the objectives of the project. ( eg budget, time)  Project organisation : The way in which the development team is organised the people involved and their roles

Milestones & Deliverables  When planning a project, a series of milestones should be established.  A milestone is an end point of a process  At each milestone there should be a formal output such as report that can be presented to the management.  A deliverable is a project result that is delivered to the customer.

 Deliverables can be milestones but milestones are not always deliverables.  For eg for feasibility study the milestones can be feasibility report for requirement specification it can be system requirements.

Project Scheduling  Project Scheduling is the most demanding task for the software managers.  It is an extremely complex task as managers have to deal with a lot of item which are probabilistic in nature.  Managers estimates the time and resources required to complete activities and organise them in a coherent sequence.

Project Scheduling includes  The project schedule is usually represented as a set of charts showing the work breakdown activities dependencies and a staff allocation.  It includes prepration of  Gantt chart  CPM  PERT