Software project management

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This article may require cleanup to meet Wikipedia's quality standards. Please improve this article if you can. (April 2008)

Software project management is a sub-discipline of project management in which software projects are planned, monitored and controlled.

Contents 1 Project Planning 2 Project monitoring and control 3 Software requirements 4 Risk management 5 Software process 6 Problems in software projects 7 Open source project management tools 8 See also 9 Literature

[edit] Project Planning

The purpose of project planning is to identify the scope of the project, estimate the work involved, and create a project schedule. Project planning begins with requirements that define the software to be developed. The project plan is then developed to describe the tasks that will lead to completion.

[edit] Project monitoring and control

The purpose of project monitoring and control is to keep the team and management up to date on the project's progress. If the project deviates from the plan, then the project manager can take action to correct the problem. Project monitoring and control involves status meetings to gather status from the team. When changes need to be made, change control is used to keep the products up to date.

[edit] Software requirements

Requirements analysis is a term used to describe all the tasks that go into the instigation, scoping and definition of a new or altered computer system. Requirements analysis is an important part of the software engineering process; whereby business analysts or software developer identify the needs or requirements of a client; having identified these requirements they are then in a position to design a solution.

[edit] Risk management

Risk management is the process of measuring, or assessing risk and then developing strategies to manage the risk. In general, the strategies employed include transferring the risk to another party, avoiding the risk, reducing the negative effect of the risk, and accepting some or all of the consequences of a particular risk. Traditional risk management, which is discussed here, focuses on risks stemming from physical or legal causes (e.g. natural disasters or fires, accidents, death, and lawsuits).

[edit] Software process

A software development process is concerned primarily with the production aspect of software development, as opposed to the technical aspect. These processes exist primarily for supporting the management of software development, and are generally skewed toward addressing business concerns.

[edit] Problems in software projects

The problems in software projects come from three different viewpoints: project managers, developers and customers. The problems project managers face include: poor roles definition, lack of estimating and planning skills, lack of decision making skills. Project managers do need to face the schedule, budget and quality constraints. The problems developers face include: lack of knowledge in the application area, lack of knowledge about developing standards, lack of up to date documentations, deadline pressure, changes of application requirements. The problems customers face include: monetary constraints, receiving products past the due date.

[edit] Open source project management tools

[edit] See also

• Estimation
• Estimation in software engineering
• Incremental funding methodology
• Project management
• Risk management
• Software development process
• Software engineering

[edit] Literature

• Brooks, Frederick P., Jr. (1995). The Mythical Man-Month: Essays on Software Engineering, 20th Anniversary Edition, Adison Wesley. ISBN 0-201-83595-9. 
• Steve McConnell (1997). Software Project Survival Guide. Microsoft Press. ISBN 1-57231-621-7. 
• Scott Berkun (2005). Art of Project Management. Sebastopol, CA: O'Reilly Media. ISBN 0-596-00786-8. 
• Andrew Stellman, Jennifer Greene (2005). Applied Software Project Management. Sebastopol, CA: O'Reilly Media. ISBN 0-596-00948-8. 
• Robert T. Futrell, Donald F. Shafer, Linda I. Shafer (2002). Quality Software Project Management. Prentice Hall PTR. ISBN 0-13-091297-2. 
• Wysocki, Robert (2003). Effective Project Management: Traditional, Adaptive, Extreme, 3rd ed., Wiley. ISBN 0-471-43221-0. 
• Highsmith, Jim (2003). Agile Project Management : Creating Innovative Products. Addison-Wesley. ISBN 0-321-21977-5. 
• Richard H. Thayer, Edward Yourdon (2000). Software Engineering Project Management, 2nd Ed., Wiley-IEEE Computer Society Press. ISBN 0-8186-8000-8. 
• Tom DeMarco and Timothy Lister (1997). Peopleware: Productive Projects and Teams, 2nd Ed., Dorset House. ISBN 0-932633-43-9. 
• Kieron Conway (2000). Software Project Management: From Concept to Deployment. Coriolis. ISBN 1-57610-807-4. 
• Enzo Frigenti & Dennis Comninos (2002). The Practice of Project Management - a guide to the business-focused approach. Kogan Page. ISBN 0-7494-3694-8. 
• Lev Virine & Michael Trumper (2007). Project Decisions: The Art and Science. Management Concepts. ISBN 978-1567262179. 
• Johanna Rothman (2007). Manage It! Your Guide to Modern, Pragmatic Project Management. The Pragmatic Programmers. ISBN 0-9787392-4-8. 
• Jared Richardson & Will Gwaltney (2005). Ship It! A Practical Guide to Successful Software Projects. The Pragmatic Programmers. ISBN 0-9745140-4-7.