 Project Management Concepts

Slide Set to accompany

Software Engineering: A Practitioner’s
Approach, 7/e
by Roger S. Pressman

Slides copyright © 1996, 2001, 2005, 2009 by Roger S. Pressman

For non-profit educational use only

May be reproduced ONLY for student use at the university level when used in conjunction
with Software Engineering: A Practitioner's Approach, 7/e. Any other reproduction or use is
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use.

1
The Four P’s
 People — the most important element
of a successful project
 Product — the software to be built
 Process — the set of framework
activities and software engineering
tasks to get the job done
 Project — all work required to make
the product a reality

2
Stakeholders
 Senior managers who define the business
issues that often have significant influence on
the project.
 Project (technical) managers who must plan,
motivate, organize, and control the practitioners
who do software work.
 Practitioners who deliver the technical skills
that are necessary to engineer a product or
application.
 Customers who specify the requirements for the
software to be engineered and other
stakeholders who have a peripheral interest in
the outcome.
 End-users who interact with the software once
it is released for production use.

3
Software Teams
How to lead?
How to organize?
How to collaborate?

How to motivate? How to create good ideas?

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Team Leader
 The MOI Model
 Motivation. The ability to encourage (by
“push or pull”) technical people to produce
to their best ability.
 Organization. The ability to mold existing
processes (or invent new ones) that will
enable the initial concept to be translated
into a final product.
 Ideas or innovation. The ability to
encourage people to create and feel
creative even when they must work within
bounds established for a particular
software product or application.

5
Software
Teams
The following factors must be considered when
selecting a software project team structure ...
 the difficulty of the problem to be solved
 the size of the resultant program(s) in lines
of code or function points
 the time that the team will stay together
(team lifetime)
 the degree to which the problem can be
modularized
 the required quality and reliability of the
system to be built
 the rigidity of the delivery date
 the degree of sociability (communication)
required for the project

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Organizational
Paradigms
closed paradigm—structures a team along a

traditional hierarchy of authority
 random paradigm—structures a team loosely and
depends on individual initiative of the team
members
 open paradigm—attempts to structure a team in
a manner that achieves some of the controls
associated with the closed paradigm but also
much of the innovation that occurs when using
the random paradigm
 synchronous paradigm—relies on the natural
compartmentalization of a problem and
organizes team members to work on pieces of
the problemsuggested
with little by Constantine
active [Con93]
communication
among themselves

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Avoid Team “Toxicity”
 A frenzied work atmosphere in which team
members waste energy and lose focus on the
objectives of the work to be performed.
 High frustration caused by personal, business,
or technological factors that cause friction
among team members.
 “Fragmented or poorly coordinated procedures”
or a poorly defined or improperly chosen process
model that becomes a roadblock to
accomplishment.
 Unclear definition of roles resulting in a lack of
accountability and resultant finger-pointing.
 “Continuous and repeated exposure to failure”
that leads to a loss of confidence and a lowering
of morale.

8
Agile Teams
 Team members must have trust in one
another.
 The distribution of skills must be appropriate
to the problem.
 Mavericks may have to be excluded from the
team, if team cohesiveness is to be
maintained.
 Team is “self-organizing”
 An adaptive team structure
 Uses elements of Constantine’s random, open,
and synchronous paradigms
 Significant autonomy

9
Team Coordination &
Communication
 Formal, impersonal approaches include software engineering
documents and work products (including source code),
technical memos, project milestones, schedules, and project
control tools (Chapter 23), change requests and related
documentation, error tracking reports, and repository data
(see Chapter 26).
 Formal, interpersonal procedures focus on quality assurance
activities (Chapter 25) applied to software engineering work
products. These include status review meetings and design
and code inspections.
 Informal, interpersonal procedures include group meetings
for information dissemination and problem solving and
“collocation of requirements and development staff.”
 Electronic communication encompasses electronic mail,
electronic bulletin boards, and by extension, video-based
conferencing systems.
 Interpersonal networking includes informal discussions with
team members and those outside the project who may have
experience or insight that can assist team members.

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The Product Scope
 Scope
• Context. How does the software to be built fit
into a larger system, product, or business
context and what constraints are imposed as a
result of the context?
• Information objectives. What customer-visible
data objects (Chapter 8) are produced as output
from the software? What data objects are
required for input?
• Function and performance. What function does
the software perform to transform input data
into output? Are any special performance
characteristics to be addressed?
 Software project scope must be
unambiguous and understandable at the
management and technical levels.
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Problem
Decomposition
 Sometimes called partitioning or problem
elaboration
 Once scope is defined …
 It is decomposed into constituent functions
 It is decomposed into user-visible data objects
or
 It is decomposed into a set of problem classes
 Decomposition process continues until
all functions or problem classes have
been defined

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The Process
 Once a process framework has been
established
 Consider project characteristics
 Determine the degree of rigor required
 Define a task set for each software
engineering activity
• Task set =
• Software engineering tasks
• Work products
• Quality assurance points
• Milestones

13
Melding the Problem and the
Process

14
The Project
 Projects get into trouble when …
 Software people don’t understand their customer’s
needs.
 The product scope is poorly defined.
 Changes are managed poorly.
 The chosen technology changes.
 Business needs change [or are ill-defined].
 Deadlines are unrealistic.
 Users are resistant.
 Sponsorship is lost [or was never properly obtained].
 The project team lacks people with appropriate
skills.
 Managers [and practitioners] avoid best practices
and lessons learned.

15
Common-Sense Approach to
Projects
 Start on the right foot. This is accomplished by working
hard (very hard) to understand the problem that is to be
solved and then setting realistic objectives and
expectations.
 Maintain momentum. The project manager must provide
incentives to keep turnover of personnel to an absolute
minimum, the team should emphasize quality in every task
it performs, and senior management should do everything
possible to stay out of the team’s way.
 Track progress. For a software project, progress is
tracked as work products (e.g., models, source code, sets
of test cases) are produced and approved (using formal
technical reviews) as part of a quality assurance activity.
 Make smart decisions. In essence, the decisions of the
project manager and the software team should be to “keep
it simple.”
 Conduct a postmortem analysis. Establish a consistent
mechanism for extracting lessons learned for each
project.

16
To Get to the Essence of a
Project
 Why is the system being developed?
 What will be done?
 When will it be accomplished?
 Who is responsible?
 Where are they organizationally
located?
 How will the job be done technically
and managerially?
 How much of each resource (e.g.,
people, software, tools, database)
Barry Boehm [Boe96]
will be needed?

17
Critical
Practices
 Formal risk management
 Empirical cost and schedule
estimation
 Metrics-based project
management
 Earned value (of tasks) tracking
 Defect tracking against quality
targets
 People aware project
management

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