Does Good Project Management Ensure Successful Software Development?

For many years the development of computer software has been plagued by poor customer satisfaction caused by missed schedules, underestimated budgets and the development of products which do not meet requirements. The ever increasing reliance on computers, as reported by Sommerville \u27\u27the result of the proliferation of computer systems into all aspects of life and business is that personal, corporate, national and international economies are [becoming] increasingly dependant on computers and software systems ( 1992, p.2), calls for more stable software which can be developed within time and budget constraints. To achieve this, software development activities must be analysed and ways to improve the success of projects suggested. This study investigates the software development process in an attempt to reveal the importance of project management to the process and establish which activities contribute most to project success. It is these activities which should receive the most attention when seeking to improve the software development process. Data was gathered through a series of questionnaires and interviews with software engineering students during their third year software engineering project at Edith Cowan University. This was analysed and conclusions drawn about the project management activities of the teams

Method Association Approach: Situational construction and evaluation of an implementation method for software products

International audience— Software implementation is one of the important steps in a software engineering process. It consists of integrating software based services or components in business alignment with the organizational view and acceptance from the users' perspectives. However, this step is complex and not supported in detail by the existing design and implementation methods. When implementing a software product in a customer organization with a specific context, the problem of the choice of the method or its adaptation is crucial to ensure the implementation success. Software producing organizations have difficulty with the creation of the most suitable implementation method for their software products. Situational Method Engineering (SME) proposes solutions to create methods adapted to the project at hand. We propose an approach to build an implementation method based on the association of method fragments, offering two advantages: it facilitates (a) the modeling of fragments by using the Process Deliverable Diagram formalism (PDD) that has proved its efficacy and simplicity, and (b) the selection of fragments by using metrics to analyze them. We illustrate our proposal with a case study to create an implementation method for a personal health management software product. Keywords— Software product implementation method, situational method engineering, method association, feature, method fragment, project situatio

Integrate the GM(1,1) and Verhulst models to predict software stage effort

This is the author's accepted manuscript. The final published article is available from the link below. Copyright @ 2009 IEEE. Personal use of this material is permitted. Permission from IEEE must be obtained for all other users, including reprinting/ republishing this material for advertising or promotional purposes, creating new collective works for resale or redistribution to servers or lists, or reuse of any copyrighted components of this work in other works.Software effort prediction clearly plays a crucial role in software project management. In keeping with more dynamic approaches to software development, it is not sufficient to only predict the whole-project effort at an early stage. Rather, the project manager must also dynamically predict the effort of different stages or activities during the software development process. This can assist the project manager to reestimate effort and adjust the project plan, thus avoiding effort or schedule overruns. This paper presents a method for software physical time stage-effort prediction based on grey models GM(1,1) and Verhulst. This method establishes models dynamically according to particular types of stage-effort sequences, and can adapt to particular development methodologies automatically by using a novel grey feedback mechanism. We evaluate the proposed method with a large-scale real-world software engineering dataset, and compare it with the linear regression method and the Kalman filter method, revealing that accuracy has been improved by at least 28% and 50%, respectively. The results indicate that the method can be effective and has considerable potential. We believe that stage predictions could be a useful complement to whole-project effort prediction methods.National Natural Science Foundation of China and the Hi-Tech Research and Development Program of Chin

Navigating The Leading Edge: A Prototype Curriculum for Software Systems Management

This article presents a meaningful and advantageous new direction for information technology education, embodying principles for systematically optimizing the functioning of the business. Our curriculum was built on the thesis that every aspect of software systems management can be understood and described as a component of four universal, highly correlated behaviors: abstraction, product creation, product verification and validation, and process optimization. Given this, our model curriculum was structured to provide the maximum exposure to current best practice in six thematic areas, which taken together as an integrated set, makes-up the attributes that differentiate us from the other computer disciplines: Abstraction: understanding and description of the problem space Design: models for framing artifact to meet criteria 3, 4, 5, and 6 Process Engineering: application of large models such as IEEE 12207 Organizational Control Systems: SQA and configuration management Evaluation with Measurement: with an emphasis on testing and metrics Construction: professional programming languages with emphasis on reusability Our teaching strategy approaches this as a hierarchy of similar activities. In every course we require the student to define and implement all three interfaces and be able to clearly communicate this as a logically consistent model before working out the details of the solution. The focus of all understanding is top-down from the information interface. Our curriculum centers on the application of software engineering standards (such as those promulgated by IEEE) and the software process improvement, or quality standards (such as those promulgated by SEI and ISO) under the assumption that this embodies the common body of knowledge and state of best practice in software production and management. The practical realization of this is an integration of the large subject areas of: software engineering (methods, models and criteria), process and product quality management (software quality assurance and metrics), software project management (work decomposition, planning, sizing and estimating), and software configuration management. Reconciliation of project and configuration management is accomplished by cross-referencing the problems, tools, notations and solutions (through explicit identification, authorization and validation procedures). As a side agenda, we have also stressed the need for re-engineering the vast number of software products currently on the shelves. This model plus germane simulated real-world experience introduces all of the relevant principles to the student within the (currently understood) framework. It allows them to develop and internalize their own comprehensive understanding and formulate a personal model of the disciplinary body of knowledge

Information behaviour characteristics of project actors in organisation management

Research shows that a large proportion of the working time of project actors is spent processing, communicating and disseminating information that is not relevant to their tasks. This makes information overload (IO) a liability that adversely affects the performance of project actors and the management of their organisations. Some advances have been achieved in structuring information resources to support the decision making process of engineering project actors. However, it is not always possible to structure and direct the right information to the right actor at the right time. Some engineering companies have taken the initiative of resolving this problem by encouraging actors to employ personal information management systems, information sifting systems, product data management systems and other software applications to help manage the problem of IO. These information systems rely on pull technology which contribute towards time delay, inefficiency and cost in actors’ information seeking process. The paper draws on information behaviour (IB) literature of engineering project actors to establish a platform for future studies on how IB can inform how information could be structured and made available to the right actor at the right time to facilitate timely decision making and organisation management. This paper proposes the SMART Push information capturing and delivery framework as a solution to IO. This could aid releasing the actor from the entire problem associated with information seeking process in order to focus on the task at hand

Creación y uso de patrones de producto dentro del marco del Personal Software Process

El presente Proyecto Fin de Carrera perteneciente a la titulación de Ingeniería Técnica en Informática de Gestión de la Universidad Carlos III de Madrid, tiene como objetivo generar unidades de conocimiento transferibles y reutilizables relacionadas con el método de proceso PSP (Personal Software Process). Se construirán patrones de producto que dan soporte a este modelo, que serán accesibles a través de un portal de Learning Management System y una Wiki. ___________________________________________________________________________________________________________This End of Degree Project pertaining to the Technical Engineering in Management Computer from the University Carlos III of Madrid has as objective generate knowledge units are portable and reusable related to the process method PSP (Personal Software Process). Product pattern will be built to provide support to this model, which will be accessible through a portal of Learning Management System and a Wiki.Ingeniería Técnica en Informática de Gestió

eXPERT approach for e-business software development

All Small and Medium Enterprises (SMEs) developing e-commerce and e-business software have similar business objectives as less time to the market, better quality, and cheaper cost. Current projects are very large and complex and it becomes difficult to handle them. There are different private methods and techniques developed to overcome this problem. The latest studies on the well-known software development methodologies and their applicability to e-projects reveal that they do not fit very well the priorities, the abilities and the corporate culture of SMEs developing e-business or e-commerce applications. Traditional methodologies assume that if the programmers tried hard enough, they could anticipate the complete set of requirements early and reduce cost by eliminating change, which can be reasonable in stable environments, but it is not the case at all in e-projects. In the fast changing environment of e-projects change cannot be eliminated; rather than eliminate rework, the new strategy is to reduce its cost, while retaining quality. There are a number of reports showing increased productivity and software quality by applying Extreme Programming (XP) principles [1]. However, even projects that have adopted several or all XP practices meet project management problems, which are related to estimating and planning the project, both in terms of time and costs. To overcome this obstacle European project eXPERT (IST-2001-34488) has the objective to define agile and integrated approach guiding development of e-projects. The approach, named also eXPERT, focuses on combining XP and Personal Software Process (PSP) practices [2]. The main aims and logics of eXPERT project and underlying software methodologies are presented in this paper. The paper is organized as follows: Section 2 presents the objectives of eXPERT project. In section 3 we describe the basic software engineering practices, which will be used – XP and PSP. Section 4 discusses issues in the process of combination of XP and PSP principles. Section 5 concludes the paper

Project management and its relation to long-term project success : an empirically based theoretical framework.

Companies implement effective project management to successfully operate in turbulent market cycles and ensure the success of their endeavors. Project management is indispensable for most industrial sectors and is employed in a variety of for-profit and non-profit organizations. It can be considered as a management method that contributes value to a variety of organizations. Many practitioners and researchers have attempted to identify the causes of project failure, the factors of project success, and the criteria to gauge this success. There has been little agreement on what constitutes project success. In response to the widespread debate surrounding project success, several lists dealing with factors related to project success have been published. The lack of agreement on the definition of project success renders the quest to identify the factors that contribute to successful project implementation moot. Without knowing what constitutes success, we cannot know what contributes to it. Practitioners are interested in recommendations for implementing project success factors and the corrective or preventative actions that should be taken if the project fails to meet one or more project success criteria. Project management and related research are, therefore facing severe criticism for not fulfilling their contributory expectations within the management discipline. The purpose of this research is to identify relationships between the project management body of knowledge and short- and long-term project success. The project management body of knowledge includes nine knowledge areas: integration, scope, time, cost, quality, communication, risk, human resources, and procurement management and five project management process groups (initiating, planning, executing, monitoring, controlling, and closing process groups) (PMBoK, 2004), while project success is related to budget/cost, schedule, customer satisfaction, user satisfaction, stakeholder satisfaction, project team satisfaction, strategic contribution of the project, financial objectives, technical objectives, performance objectives, commercial benefit for contractors, commercial benefit for customer, scope, personal growth, customer approval, profitability, and sales. This study is based on a self-conducted survey of 163 members of the Project Management Institute / German Chapter from October 8, 2013 to January 31st, 2014, who are project managers, project coordinators, or project team members. The business areas included in the survey are computers / information technology, construction, engineering, education, government, health care, manufacturing, software development, and telecommunications. Pearson chi-square tests and Fisher\u27s exact tests were performed to examine whether relationships exist between the project management body of knowledge and project success (short-term and long-term project success). The study revealed significant evidence of relationships between the outputs of the project management body of knowledge and short- and long-term project success. The study revealed also that project success depends on the project type, project size and project business area. The main contributions of this dissertation are: (a) an empirically based investigation of the relationship between outputs of the management processes and the project judgment criteria; (b) a closing of the existing gap in the literature regarding the link between factors that contribute to project success and ways to measure it (in previous studies project success criteria and success factors have been investigated in isolation); (c) a holistic analysis of the project management body of knowledge by providing an organized view of the outputs of each project management process that could influence short- and long-term project resulting outcomes; and (d) a framework for the analysis and improvement of project outcomes by using the theory of constraints