TESTING - SOFTWARE PROJECT MANAGEMENT (SPM)

- Organizing, planning and scheduling software projects.

- Concerned with activities involved in ensuring that software is delivered on time and on schedule and in accordance with the requirements of the organizations developing and procuring the software.

- Needed because software development is always subject to budget and schedule constraints that are set by the organization developing the software.

Objective:

- To introduce software project management and to describe its distinctive characteristics.

- To discuss project planning and the planning process.

- To show how graphical schedule representations are used by project management.

- To discuss the notion of risks and the risk management process.

Software Management Distinctions:

- Product is intangible.

- Product is uniquely flexible.

- Software engineering is not recognized as an engineering discipline with the same status as mechanical, electrical engineering, etc.

- Software Project Management is not standardized.

Topics covered:

- Management Activities

- Project planning

- Project scheduling

- Risk management

Management Activities:

- Proposal writing.

- Project planning and scheduling.

- Project costing.

- Project monitoring and reviews.

- Personnel selection and evaluation.

- Report writing and presentations.

Management Commonalities:

- Not peculiar to software management.

- Many techniques of engineering project management are equally applicable to Software Project Management.

- Technically complex engineering systems tend to suffer from the same problems as software systems.

Project Planning:

- Most time-consuming project management activity.

- Continuous activity from initial concept. ie. Plans must be regularly revised as new information becomes available.

- Various different types of plans may be developed to support.

- Types of Project Plan:

· Quality Plan – Quality procedures and standards.

· Validation Plan – Approach, Resource and Schedule.

· Configuration Management Plan – Configuration Management procedures and statements.

· Maintenance Plan – Predicts the maintenance requirements of the system, maintenance costs and efforts required.

· Staff Development Plan – How the skills and experience of the project team members will be developed.

Project Planning Process:

Establish the project constraints

Make initial assessments of project parameters

Define project milestones and deliverables

While project has not been completed or cancelled loop

Draw up project schedule

Initiate activities according to schedule

Wait (for a while)

Review project progress

Revise estimates of project parameters

Update the project schedule

Re-negotiate project constraints and deliverables

If (problems arise) then

Initiate technical review and possible revision

Endif

End loop

Project Plan Structure:

- Introduction.

- Project organization.

- Risk analysis.

- Hardware and software resource requirements.

- Work benchdown.

- Project schedule.

- Monitoring and reporting mechanism.

Milestones in the RE process:

Project Scheduling:

- Split project into tasks and estimate time and resources required to complete each task.

- Organize tasks concurrently to make optimal use of workforce.

- Minimize task dependencies to avoid delays caused by one task waiting for another to complete.

- Dependent on project managers intuition and experience.

The Project Scheduling Process:

Scheduling Problems:

- Estimating the difficulty of problems and hence the cost of developing a solution is hard.

- Productivity not proportional to the number of people working on a task.

- Adding people to a late project makes it later because of communication overheads.

- Unexpected always happens. Always allow contingency in planning.