Concepts of Project Management

The management spectrum

The software project management focuses on four P's. They are as follows:

1. People
  • It deals with the motivated, highly skilled people.
  • It consists of the stakeholders, the team leaders and the software team.
2. Product
  • The product objectives and the scope should be established before the project planning.
3. Process
  • Process provides framework for creating the software development plan.
  • The umbrella activities like software quality assurance, software configuration management and measurement cover the process model.
4. Project
  • The planned and controlled software projects are managed for one reason. It is known way of managing complexity.
  • To avoid the project failure, the developer should avoid a set of common warning, develop a common sense approach for planning, monitoring and controlling the project etc.

Problem Decomposition

  • Problem decomposition is known as partitioning or problem elaboration.
  • It is an activity present during the software requirement analysis.
  • The problem is not completely decomposed during the scope of software.
This activity is applied during the two important areas:
  • First, the information and functionality should be delivered.
  • Second, the process used to deliver it.

Process Decomposition

A software team must have a significant level of flexibility for choosing the software process model which is best for the project and populate the model after it chosen.

Following work tasks are needed in simple and small projects for communication activity:

  • Establish a list of clarification issues.
  • To address these issues meet the stakeholders.
  • A statement of scope should develop together. Review it with all concerned and modify it as needed.
Following work tasks are required in complex project for communication activity:

  • Review the user or customer request.
  • Schedule and plan a formal and facilitated meeting with all customers.
  • Research is conducted to specify the proposed solution and existing approaches.
  • For the formal meetings, prepare a schedule and working document.
  • The use cases describe the software from the user point of view.
  • Review the use case for the consistency, correctness and lack of ambiguity.
  • Gather the use case into a scoping document, review it with all concerned.
  • Modify the use cases as needed.

Process and Project Metrics

1. Process Metrics
Process metrics are collected over all project and long period of time.

It allows a project manager:
  • Access the status of ongoing project.
  • Track the potential risks.
  • Uncover the problem area before going to critical.
  • Adjust the tasks.
  • To control the quality of the software work products evaluate the project team's ability.
2. Project Metrics
  • On most software projects the first application of project metrics occurs through the estimation.
  • Metrics are collected from the previous projects act as base using which effort and time estimates are created for current software work.
  • The time and effort are compared to original estimates as a project goes on.
  • If the quality is improved then the defects are minimized and if the defect goes down, then the amount of rework needed during the project is also reduced.
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