An Introduction to the Management of Complex Software Projects


Book Description

This book explores the challenges of managing software projects, such as changing requirements, uncertain technologies, and evolving user needs, provides strategies for addressing these and other emerging issues, and contains a number of eye-opening perspectives from experts in different fields. Instead of relying solely on traditional project management techniques, the book presents a holistic, adaptive, and flexible framework that takes into account the unique challenges of each particular case of software development. It recognizes that software development is a complex and creative process that involves people with diverse skills and personalities, and provides insights into how to motivate and manage teams, how to communicate effectively, how to automate processes, and how to deal with conflict and uncertainty, from computer engineering and mathematical logic, all the way to advanced geophysics and earthquake engineering. It provides a wealth of practical advice and guidance, as well as insights into the latest schools of thought related to software project management.




Introduction to Software Project Management


Book Description

Although software development is one of the most complex activities carried out by man, sound development processes and proper project management can help ensure your software projects are delivered on time and under budget. Providing the know-how to manage software projects effectively, Introduction to Software Project Management supplies an acces




The Nature of Software Development


Book Description

You need to get value from your software project. You need it "free, now, and perfect." We can't get you there, but we can help you get to "cheaper, sooner, and better." This book leads you from the desire for value down to the specific activities that help good Agile projects deliver better software sooner, and at a lower cost. Using simple sketches and a few words, the author invites you to follow his path of learning and understanding from a half century of software development and from his engagement with Agile methods from their very beginning. The book describes software development, starting from our natural desire to get something of value. Each topic is described with a picture and a few paragraphs. You're invited to think about each topic; to take it in. You'll think about how each step into the process leads to the next. You'll begin to see why Agile methods ask for what they do, and you'll learn why a shallow implementation of Agile can lead to only limited improvement. This is not a detailed map, nor a step-by-step set of instructions for building the perfect project. There is no map or instructions that will do that for you. You need to build your own project, making it a bit more perfect every day. To do that effectively, you need to build up an understanding of the whole process. This book points out the milestones on your journey of understanding the nature of software development done well. It takes you to a location, describes it briefly, and leaves you to explore and fill in your own understanding. What You Need: You'll need your Standard Issue Brain, a bit of curiosity, and a desire to build your own understanding rather than have someone else's detailed ideas poured into your head.




Effective Software Project Management


Book Description

Why another book on software project management? For some time, the fields of project management, computer science, and software development have been growing rapidly and concurrently. Effective support for the enterprise demands the merging of these efforts into a coordinated discipline, one that incorporates best practices from both systems development and project management life cycles. Robert K. Wysocki creates that discipline in this book--a ready reference for professionals and consultants as well as a textbook for students of computer information systems and project management. By their very nature, software projects defy a "one size fits all" approach. In these pages you will learn to apply best-practice principles while maintaining the flexibility that's essential for successful software development. Learn how to make the planning process fit the need * Understand how and why software development must be planned on a certainty-to-uncertainty continuum * Categorize your projects on a four-quadrant model * Learn when to use each of the five SDPM strategies--Linear, Incremental, Iterative, Adaptive, and Extreme * Explore the benefits of each strategic model and what types of projects it supports best * Recognize the activities that go into the Scoping, Planning, Launching, Monitoring/Controlling, and Closing phases of each strategy * Apply this knowledge to the specific projects you manage * Get a clear picture of where you are and how to get where you want to go




The Business of Projects


Book Description

The Business of Projects broke ground when it was first published in 2005, by showing how leading businesses create and implement projects to drive strategy and innovation. Projects are used to coordinate activities with customers and suppliers and ensure that organisations become more dynamic and adaptable. The book extends the resource-based view of the firm to focus on the business lessons learned from the design and production of high-value complex products and systems (CoPS), which have always been project-based. As well as frameworks and management tools, it provides case studies of high-technology industries - such as telecommunications, flight simulation and medical devices - to show how projects are used to achieve strategic objectives, perform systems integration, organise productive activities, manage software, achieve organisational learning and deliver solutions for customers. This book is essential reading for project professionals, academics, students, engineers, managers and policy makers seeking a strategic, innovative perspective on projects.




Agile Project Management with Scrum


Book Description

The rules and practices for Scrum—a simple process for managing complex projects—are few, straightforward, and easy to learn. But Scrum’s simplicity itself—its lack of prescription—can be disarming, and new practitioners often find themselves reverting to old project management habits and tools and yielding lesser results. In this illuminating series of case studies, Scrum co-creator and evangelist Ken Schwaber identifies the real-world lessons—the successes and failures—culled from his years of experience coaching companies in agile project management. Through them, you’ll understand how to use Scrum to solve complex problems and drive better results—delivering more valuable software faster. Gain the foundation in Scrum theory—and practice—you need to: Rein in even the most complex, unwieldy projects Effectively manage unknown or changing product requirements Simplify the chain of command with self-managing development teams Receive clearer specifications—and feedback—from customers Greatly reduce project planning time and required tools Build—and release—products in 30-day cycles so clients get deliverables earlier Avoid missteps by regularly inspecting, reporting on, and fine-tuning projects Support multiple teams working on a large-scale project from many geographic locations Maximize return on investment!




Software Quality Assurance


Book Description

Software Quality Assurance in Large Scale and Complex Software-intensive Systems presents novel and high-quality research related approaches that relate the quality of software architecture to system requirements, system architecture and enterprise-architecture, or software testing. Modern software has become complex and adaptable due to the emergence of globalization and new software technologies, devices and networks. These changes challenge both traditional software quality assurance techniques and software engineers to ensure software quality when building today (and tomorrow's) adaptive, context-sensitive, and highly diverse applications. This edited volume presents state of the art techniques, methodologies, tools, best practices and guidelines for software quality assurance and offers guidance for future software engineering research and practice. Each contributed chapter considers the practical application of the topic through case studies, experiments, empirical validation, or systematic comparisons with other approaches already in practice. Topics of interest include, but are not limited, to: quality attributes of system/software architectures; aligning enterprise, system, and software architecture from the point of view of total quality; design decisions and their influence on the quality of system/software architecture; methods and processes for evaluating architecture quality; quality assessment of legacy systems and third party applications; lessons learned and empirical validation of theories and frameworks on architectural quality; empirical validation and testing for assessing architecture quality. - Focused on quality assurance at all levels of software design and development - Covers domain-specific software quality assurance issues e.g. for cloud, mobile, security, context-sensitive, mash-up and autonomic systems - Explains likely trade-offs from design decisions in the context of complex software system engineering and quality assurance - Includes practical case studies of software quality assurance for complex, adaptive and context-critical systems




Overcoming Challenges in Software Engineering Education: Delivering Non-Technical Knowledge and Skills


Book Description

Computer science graduates often find software engineering knowledge and skills are more in demand after they join the industry. However, given the lecture-based curriculum present in academia, it is not an easy undertaking to deliver industry-standard knowledge and skills in a software engineering classroom as such lectures hardly engage or convince students. Overcoming Challenges in Software Engineering Education: Delivering Non-Technical Knowledge and Skills combines recent advances and best practices to improve the curriculum of software engineering education. This book is an essential reference source for researchers and educators seeking to bridge the gap between industry expectations and what academia can provide in software engineering education.




Essentials of Software Engineering


Book Description

Written for the undergraduate, one-term course, Essentials of Software Engineering, Fourth Edition provides students with a systematic engineering approach to software engineering principles and methodologies. Comprehensive, yet concise, the Fourth Edition includes new information on areas of high interest to computer scientists, including Big Data and developing in the cloud.




New Trends in Software Methodologies, Tools and Techniques


Book Description

Annotation. The Lyee International Workshop (Lyee-W02) is a means for presenting the results of the Lyee International research project, oriented for new software generation techniques based on Lyee technologies. Lyee-W02 will help to build a forum for exchanging ideas and experiences in the field of new directions on software development methodologies and its tools and techniques. Lyee methodology captures the essence of the innovations, controversies, challenges, and possible solutions of the software industry. This theory is born from experience and it is the time to stimulate the academic research on software science initiated from experience to theory through this workshop and its coming series.