Management of Software Development Projects
Management of Software Development Projects
Management of Software Development Projects
phases.
Monitoring
Planning and Closing Project End
Controlling
Executing
Initiating
Any major software development starts with the Initiating process
group that usually means an iterative clarification of the high level
customer needs, including but not limited to the project justification,
objectives, high level requirements, summary budget, milestones, risks
and so on. All these items become part of the project charter.
Planning
Once the charter document is approved, the program will progress
from Initiating to the Planning stage. At this point the analysis part
starts by identifying the scope of the individual projects and the actions
to be performed in order to meet the requirements, so the approved
project management plans will be available including requirements
refinement, scope definition, WBS creation, schedule, cost and budget
estimations, quality requirements, risk identifications, response planning
and so on. The WBS will be detailed at the component level, so a typical
WBS would look like the one presented below (Figure 2).
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Based on the project charter, the analysis part should first generate
a unique Integrated SRS document (at the program level) that will
describe the use cases. This document will be used as a basis for the test
cases generation.
The WBS creation will start right after and it will be first detailed at
feature level. The analysis part will be continued with a complete
clarification of requirements. For each delivery, a dedicated SRS
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document will be created and it will be used to design the test cases and
to split the features to be delivered into more manageable components
by generating HLD documents so, finally, the latest WBS levels will be
filled in.
Executing
The executing activities will be performed at the Project &
Delivery level, so, for example, the Project #1 work will begin with the
Delivery #1, followed by Delivery #2 and so on. Once a component is
completely implemented (all the corresponding features are developed
and individually tested), it will be moved further to the inspection and
validation activities. The Quality Control can perform intermediate tests
in order to validate some features, but these tests cannot replace the full
delivery package inspection, as described in the next section.
Controlling
Quality Control will be FIRST performed at Project & Delivery level,
so a dedicated quality check will take place for each delivery of a project,
since these deliveries are managed at project level. There will be a
separate role at the Quality Control Department level having the
responsibility of assembling the individual components into a single
package (installation kit and/or fix/service pack and/or …) corresponding
to the entire delivery for a project.
Finally, a dedicated deliverer role (at the project level) will perform
the delivery of the packages that are considered as passing BOTH
STEPS of validations.
Monitoring
In order to measure the potential performance deviation of the
program (and its corresponding projects) in terms of schedule and costs,
the EVM (Earned Value Management) method is applied by starting from
the following values:
Closing
Project closing is assisting the program and project managers to
make sure all the program work is completed and the projects have met
their objectives stated into the charter and project management plans.
Conclusions
This article tries to illustrate a methodology to be used to
complement the PMI’s standard of management for software
development projects and programs. The Project Management Institute
standard is actually considered as being a project management
reference, a framework that can be applied most of the time to most of
the projects so that success chances could be greatly increased. The five
Project Management Process Groups highlight the integrative nature of
projects and project management.
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References
[1] Frank F. Tsui, Orlando Karam, Essentials of Software
Engineering, Second Edition, Jones & Bartlett Publishers, 2009
[2] Project Management Institute, A Guide to the Project
Management Body of Knowledge: PMBOK Guide, Project
Management Institute, 2008
[3] Project Management Institute, Practice Standard for Earned
Value Management, Project Management Institute, 2005
[4] Project Management Institute, Practice Standard for Project
Configuration Management, Project Management Institute, 2007
[5] Project Management Institute, Practice Standard for Work
Breakdown Structure, Project Management Institute, 2nd
edition, 2006
[6] Project Management Institute, The Standard for Program
Management, Project Management Institute, 2nd edition, 2008