Software Project Management

Plan, methods and methodologies : A plan for an activity must be based on some idea of a method of work. To take a simple example, if you were asked to test some software, even though you do not know anything about the software to be tested, you could assume that you would need to: Analyze the requirements for the software. Devise and write test cases that will check that each requirement has been satisfied. Create test scripts and expected results for each test case. Compare the actual results and the expected results and identity discrepancies. While a method relates to a type of activity in general, a plan takes that method and converts it to real activities, identifying for each activity. ·          Its start and end dates. ·          Who will carry it out. ·          What tools and materials will used. ‘Materials’ in this contex...

  Requirement specification : Requirements play a driving role during product creation. The requirements are captured in a requirements specification. The objectives of the project are carefully defined in terms of functional requirements, quality requirement and resource requirements. Functional requirements: These define what the end product of the project is to do. Systems analysis and design methods, such as SADT and Information Engineering are designed primarily to provide functional requirements. Quality requirements:   There will be other attributes of the application to be implemented that do not relate so much to what the system is to do but how it is to do. These are still things that the user will be able to experience. They include, for example, response time, the ease of using the system and its reliability. Resource requirement: A record of how much the organization is willing to spend on the system. The...

  Stakeholders: These are people who have a stake or interest in the project. It is important that they be identified as early as possible, because you need to set up adequate communication channels with them right from the start. The project leader also has to be aware that not everybody who is involved with a project has the same motivation and objectives. The end users might, for instance, be concerned about the ease of use of the system while their managers might be interested in the staff savings the new system will allow. Stakeholders might be internal to the project team, external to the project team but in the same organization, or totally external to the organization. Internal to the project team : This means that they will be under the direct managerial control of the project leader. External to the project team but within the same organization: For example- the project leader might need the assistance of the information management group in order t...

Setting Objectives: To have a successful software project, the manager and the project team members must know what will constitute success. This will make them concentrate on what is essential to project success. There may be several sets of users of a system and there may be several different groups of specialties involved its development. There is a need for well-defined objectives that are accepted by all these people. Where there is more then one user group, a project authority needs to be identified which has over all authority over what the project is to achieve. This authority is often held by project movement of committee (project board or project management board) which has overall responsibility for setting, monitoring and modifying objectives. The project manger still has responsibility for running the project on a day to day basis, but has to report to the movement of   committee at regular intervals. Only the movement of committee can authorize changes to the p...

Management Control: The project control cycle: Management, in general, can be seen as the process of setting objectives for a system and then monitoring to see what its true performance is. Especially in the case of large undertaking, there will be a lot going on about which management should be aware. As an example- taken an IT project that to replace locally held paper-based records with a centrally organized database. In might be that staff in a large number of offices that are geographically dispersed need training and then need to use the new IT system to set up the back log on manual records on the new database.