Software Project Management

Effective management of the software project management involves four P-s: People, Product, Process, and Project. The manager that forgets people’s aspect of software engineering will never achieve success in the management of their projects. The manager who does not properly communicate with their clients, especially in the early stage of the product development, risks to create an elegant solution for a wrong problem (task). The manager who pays little attention to the process risks to apply state-of-the-art technical solutions in the wrong place and the wrong time. Today’s software project management methods go well beyond the classical Waterfall approach, and typically involve the Unified process (including RUP), as well as the Agile methodology (including Scrum). This book edition covers different aspects of the software project management process. It is divided in five Sections, described as follows. Section 1 - Covers Management of People and Resources, describing the estimation of human resources needed in the software projects, their suitability for particular software development task, the impact of the people on the project, and the resource allocation among phases. Section 2 - Covers Configuration and Program management, discussing about managing changes in complex and large scale IT projects, as well as the COSMIC methodology for work effort estimation per unit size. Section 3 - Covers the Agile methodology focusing on the concepts of Agile, its comparison with the traditional approaches, the Scrum method explanation, and AgileMOW – a method for Agile web-based project estimation. Section 4 - Covers Process management and Tools, describing internal controls in business processes, comparison between MS Project and Primavera using a scoring model, and the concept of Ontologies in the software project management. Section 5 - Covers the Project Risk management, including categorization of software release risks, a new taxonomy for risk attitude estimation and a new methodology for the risk management.