scholarly journals The Frog and the Octopus—Experience Teaching Software Project Management

Author(s):  
Philippe Kruchten

How do you teach software project management to 4th year engineering students, when there is nothing to manage, and the largest project they’ve ever experienced was with two buddies last term? In this paper, we present our experience over seven years teaching this topic alternatively to industrial practitioners, and to undergraduate and graduate students in an academic environment, both in Canada and in the Netherlands. The approach is based on a conceptual model of software development that takes into account the common aspects across a vast spectrum of software projects (“the frog”): intent, product, work, people, time, uncertainty, quality cost and value, and the variability across this spectrum (“the octopus”): size, criticality, business model, governance, team distribution, culture, etc.. This conceptual model is used throughout to (1) structure the course, (2) introduce issues, techniques, practices, and analyze them from a critical perspective: what would the frog say? what would the octopus say? (3) map other models, frameworks, or standards in this field: PMBOK, ISO 12207, RUP, Agile and lean approaches, ACM/IEEE SE 2004 curriculum. Rather than delivering to the students a canned set of recipes, the objective is to allow them to reason about the strategies, techniques, practices and tools that are most applicable to a given set of circumstances. The approach is complemented by small simulation games used to illustrate a few aspects and to trigger discussion (what happened, how realistic is this, how would you do differently?), or short videos of practices used to initiate a debate in class on a given practice.

2020 ◽  
Vol 13 (36) ◽  
pp. 3785-3800
Author(s):  
Kamal Uddin Sarker ◽  

Objectives: This research addresses the causal relationship among processes, tasks, resources, and stakeholders of the software projects to improve the success rate that is 31% only now (CHAOS report 2019). Methods: A software project management framework is developed based on the findings of an empirical study on recent commonly used methodologies and root cause analysis on the reasons for project failure. The causeeffect relationship is prioritized by Structural Equation Modeling (SEM) to develop the Explicit Specification Framework (ESF). The framework is tied to the pinpointing with ontology for formal presentation, descriptive logic for unambiguous information specification, and ikigai for decision-making.Findings: The proposed framework is evaluated by a group of experts and their average scope is evaluated by a group comparison mechanism called Grey Rational Analysis (GRA). The evaluation process considered 6 parameters and compared it with 4 commonly used project management approaches. The highest GRA rank is found for the average of six distinct parameters though it is comparatively more complex for explicit documentation. The three-layer architecture of ESF remarks on roles, functions, and respective stakeholders in each layer presented by a comprehensive comparison study with literature and found that it enhances formal practice, sustainability, and management capability. ESF is easy to implement for distributed project management and improving automation facilities in the software industries.Novelty/Application: Artificial intelligence, the Internet of things, and big data would be common elements of a software project and ESF would meet the demand for project information specification, management, and control. Keywords: Software Project Management; Software Quality Control; methodology; multi- criteria decision making; structural educational modeling; ontology


2018 ◽  
Vol 11 (4) ◽  
pp. 680
Author(s):  
Lucas Florêncio de Brito ◽  
Ricardo Argenton Ramos ◽  
Rosalvo Ferreira de Oliveira Neto ◽  
Brauliro Gonçalves Leal

One of the causes of bad software planning is the lack of qualified professionals and that in order to improve their quality it is necessary to improve the quality of teaching in the Software Engineering area. Educational games present themselves as a promising alternative as a method of teaching support, since they are able to teach while they entertain, motivating the student to learn, however, there is still a need to evaluate the real benefits of this didactic resource. Thus, this work evaluated qualitatively and quantitatively the game SimulES (Software Engineering Simulator), an educational cards game that simulates the software process development. Applying it to Computer Engineering students at UNIVASF in the Software Engineering II discipline, with the purpose of inferring its effectiveness in teaching software project management. The application of the game was done with 22 students in the semester of 2017.1 and to measure the quality of learning obtained through the game was applied a questionnaire that uses Kirkpatrick reaction concepts, ARCS Model, User Experience in Games and BLOOM Taxonomy. The result of the analysis by t Student test showed that the game's activities are fun, enjoyable and challenging, as well as being able to motivate students to learn software project management and contribute to learning that content.


2022 ◽  
pp. 163-182
Author(s):  
Kamalendu Pal

Agile software development methodologies are attracting attention from academics and practitioners for planning and managing software projects. The eXtreme Programming (XP) challenges conformist wisdom regarding software system development processes and practices as agile methodologies. To work efficiently in the current software development practice, characterized by requirements fuzziness, XP moves away from document-centric operations into people-centric management. In the XP-based software project, the customers play an essential role, having multiple responsibilities such as driving the project, gathering requirements (‘user stories'), and exercising quality control (or acceptance testing). Besides, the customers must liaise with external project stakeholders (e.g., funding authorities, end-users) while maintaining the development team's trust and the wider business. The success of such software project management practices relies on the quality result of each stage of development obtained through rigorous testing. This chapter describes three characteristics of XP project management: customer role, software testing feedback, and learning.


2019 ◽  
Vol 8 (2S11) ◽  
pp. 3934-3937

Success of Software projects is the main objective of any IT organization. Software Project management is a combination of People, Process and Technology to support the success of software projects. IT Governance ensures operational efficiency though various control mechanisms at a Project, Program and Portfolio level. Currently we have a gap in Governance and compliance process in predicting the success of software projects. This paper is focused on optimizing software governance with a logical predictive model


10.28945/3157 ◽  
2007 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rita Nienaber ◽  
Andries Barnard

Despite various research efforts originating from both academia and industry, software projects have a high rate of failure, more specific, software projects often do not comply with the traditional standard measurements of success, namely time, cost and requirements specification. Thus, there is a need for new methods and measures to support the software project management process. Globalisation and advances in computing technologies has changed the software project management environment. Currently software projects are developed and deployed in distributed, pervasive and collaborative environments and traditional project management methods cannot, and do not, address the added complexities inherent to this environment. In this paper the utilisation of stationary and mobile software agents is investigated as a potential tool to assist with the improvement of software project management processes. In particular we propose and discuss a software agent framework to support software project management. Although still in its initial phases, this research shows promise of significant results in enabling software developers to meet market expectations, and produce projects on time, within budget and to users’ satisfaction.


2016 ◽  
Vol 2 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Syarif Hidayatulloh

Abstract - software project management is the art and science of planning and supervision in software projects. On project management software many emerging constraints that could result in his development and software development. One of the key points in a project the software repository is the time it takes to comment on, add and merge source code. Rapid feedback to make the members of a software project team was pleased to contribute in a software project. Problems on Github repository is when the notification was delivered via the web and email are not directly addressed because the members of the project management software rarely check emails. The methods used in this study is a literature study and experiments of different cases in the article, book or paper that discusses how to implement project management software quality so the software project goals can be achieved. Conclusion the results of the research that has been done is to apply the SMS notification on Github is expected to further speed up the interaction and communication between members in a software project and makes it easier for an IT manager in conducting management on Github project. Keywords: Software project management, GitHub, notification, SMS Abstrak - Manajemen proyek Perangkat lunak adalah seni dan ilmu perencanaan dan pembimbingan dalam proyek perangkat lunak. Pada manajemen proyek perangkat lunak banyak muncul kendala-kendala yang dapat mengakibatkan lamanya pembangunan dan pengembangan perangkat lunak. Salah satu poin penting dalam sebuah repositori proyek perangkat lunak adalah waktu yang dibutuhkan untuk mengomentari, menambahkan dan menggabungkan source code. Feedback yang cepat membuat anggota-anggota tim proyek perangkat lunak merasa senang untuk berkontribusi dalam sebuah proyek perangkat lunak. Permasalahan pada repositori Github adalah ketika notifikasi yang disampaikan lewat web dan email tidak langsung ditanggapi karena anggota-anggota proyek manajemen perangkat lunak jarang memeriksa email. Metode yang digunakan dalam penelitian ini adalah eksperimen dan studi pustaka dari berbagai kasus dalam artikel, buku atau paper yang membahas bagaimana melaksanakan manajemen proyek perangkat lunak yang berkualitas sehingga tujuan proyek perangkat lunak dapat dicapai. Kesimpulan hasil penelitian yang telah dilakukan adalah dengan menerapkan notifikasi SMS pada Github diharapkan dapat lebih mempercepat interaksi dan komunikasi antar anggota dalam sebuah proyek perangkat lunak serta mempermudah seorang IT manager dalam melakukan manajemen pada Github project. Keywords: Software project management, GitHub, notifikasi, SMS


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