Software Engineering: 2. Project management

resources:"Software Engineering" Ian Sommerville

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For most projects, important goals are:

• Deliver the software to customer at the agreed time.
• Keep overall costs within budget.
• Deliver software that meets the customer's expections.
• Maintain a happy and well-functioning development team.

Keywords:

• organizational budget
• schedule constraints
• project meets
• high-quality

The reponsibilities of managers:

• Project planning
• Reporting
• Risk management
• People management
• Proposal writing: The first stage in a software project may involve writing a proposal to win a contract to carry out an item of work. The proposal describes the objectives of the project and how it will be carried out. It usually includes costs and schedule estimates and justifies why the project contract should be awarded to a particular organization or team.

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1. Risk management

Three related categories of risk:

• Project risks: risks that affect the project schedule or resources
  • example: the loss of experienced designer
• Product risks: risks that affect the quality or performance of the software being developed
  • example: the failure of a purchased component to perform as expected
• Business risks: risks that affect the organization developing or procuring the software
  • example: a competitor introducing a new product is a business

You may need to draw up contingency plans so that, if the risks do occur, you can take immediate recovery action.

Examples of common risks:

• Staff turnover :Experienced staff will leave the project before it is finished
• Management change
• Hardware unavailability
• Requirements change
• Specification delays
• Size underestimate
• CASE tool underperformance
• Technology change
• Product competition

The process of risk management:

1. Risk identification
2. Risk analysis
3. Risk planning
4. Risk monitoring

1.1 Risk identification

Risk identification may be a team process where a team get together to brainstorm possible risks. Alternatively, the project manager may simply use his or her experience to identify the most probable or critical risks.

There are at least six types of risk that may be included in a risk checklist:

1. Technology risks
2. People risks
3. Organizational risks: risks that derive from the organizational environment where the software is being developed.
4. tools risks
5. Requirements risks
6. Estimation risks: risks that derive from the management estimates of the resources required to build the system.

1.2 Risk analysis

The probability of the risk might be assessed as very low (<10%), low (10-25%), moderate (25-50%), high (50-75%), or very high (>75%)

Once the risks have been analyzed and ranked, you should assess which of these risks are most significant.

1.3 Risk planning

There are three categoriess for strategies:

1. avoidance strategies
2. minimization strategies
3. contingency plans: your are prepared for the worst and have a stratefy in place to deal with it.

1.4 Risk monitoring

Risk monitoring is the process of checking that your assumptions about the product, process, and business risks have not changed.

2. Managing people

There are four critical factors in people management:

• Consistency: People in a project team should all be treated in a comparable way.
• Respect
• Inclusion: People contribute effectively when they feel that others listen to them and take account of their proposals.
• Honesty

If some lose interest in the work, you should sort out the problem quickly, otherwise the other group members will become dissatisfied and feel that they are doing an unfair share of the work.

Motivating people

Professionals can be classified into three types:

• Task-oriented people: motivated by the work they do
• Self-oriented people: motiviated by personal success
• Interaction-oriented people : motivated by the presence and actions of co-workers. As software development becomes more usercentered, interaction oriented individuals are becoing more involved in software engineering.

Interaction-oriented personalities usually like to work as part of a group, whereas task-oriented and self-oriented people usually prefer to act as individuals.

Each individual's motivation is made up of elements of each class but one type of motivation is usually dominant at any one time.

Individuals can change. For example, technical people who feel they are not being properly rewarded can become self-oriented and put personal interests before technical concerns. If a group works particularly well, self-oriented people can become more interaction-oriented.

3. Teamwork

keywords: cohesiveness

3.1 Selecting group members

A group that has complementary personalities may work better than a group that is selected solely on technical ability.

3.2 Group organization

Informal groups: most group members are experienced and competent.

Hierarchical groups [haɪə'rɑːkɪk(ə)l]: have a hierarchical structure with the group leader at the top of the hierarchy

3.3 Group communications

Group members must exchange:

• information on the status of their work
• the design decisions that have been made
• changes to previous design decisions

Group members come to understand the motivations, strengths, and weaknesses of other people in the group.

The effectiveness and efficiency of communications is influenced by:

1. Group size
2. Group structure
3. Group composition
4. The physical work environment
5. The available communication channels