Software Project Management

In order to organize and manage a software development project successfully, one must combine specific knowledge, skills, efforts, experience, capabilities, and even intuition. They are all necessary in order to be able answer questions such as: What artifacts to manage and control during software development? How to organize the development team? What are the indicators and measures of the product's quality? How to employ a certain set of development practices? How to transition a software development organization to a new modeling and/or development paradigm? How to create and maintain a good relationship with the customers and end-users? What remedial actions to take when something goes wrong in the course of the project? What are the heuristics that can help managers in conducting the software development process? The manager of a software development project should answer the above questions in the context of the project itself. However, there is a vast amount of knowledge the manager should possess that transcends the boundaries of any specific project. The purpose of this chapter is to provide an extended overview of many important issues around which such knowledge should be structured. The introductory section merely introduces the issues and the context within which the other sections discuss them. Each of the remaining sections covers one of the issues in more detail. The idea has been to provide a balanced coverage of the issues from both the manager's and the developer's perspectives.