C23: Software Project Management Flashcards
What does Software Project Management focus on?
Effort Estimation, Planning and Scheduling, Software Process, Process Improvement and Risk Management.
What are the different project formats?
Project-based Organization: Each project or subproject is assigned to a team.
Function-based Organization: Different life-cycle activities referred to as functions are assigned to a team.
Hybrid Organization: A combination of Project-based and Function-based organizations.
What are the benefits of function-based organizations?
Specialized teams tend to increase effectiveness and efficiency because the function teams can be formed by members who are experts in the functional areas.
It works well for a distributed environment in which different functional activities are performed at different locations.
It could result in lower development costs because of increased effectiveness, efficiency and lower resource utilization,
Define the team structure.
Is concerned with the organization of the project teams, which is assigning roles and responsibilities to the team members.
What are the different types of team structures?
Egoless Team Structure: All member participate in decision making and decisions are usually made by consensus. Team lead is a coordinator, not a commander, non-hierarchical.
Chief Programmer Team Structure: Consists of a chief programmer manages the project, makes all decisions and supervises other team members.
Hierarchical Structure: Consists of a project manager, who supervises a number of senior engineers, each in turn supervises a number of junior software engineers and so forth. Can be viewed as combining the egoless team structure with the chief programmer team structure.
What are the different effort estimation methods?
Function Point Mehod: A product of the gross function point and the processing complexity adjustment.
COCOMO II Method: Consists of Application Composition Model, Early Design Model, Post-Architecture Model
Delphi Estimation Method: Relies on a group of expert to produce the estimation.
Agile Estimation: Effort estimation can and must change. It relies on intuition and common sense, rather than mathematical formulas.
Define project planning and scheduling.
Is concerned with the scheduling of development activities and allocation of resources to the development activities.
What are the different methods of project planning and scheduling?
PERT Chart: A digraph that can’t have cycles and must have one source and one sink. A set of vertexes represent project milestones.
Grant Chart: A tool for computing the earliest time and latest completion time for each of the milestones as well as the earliest completion time of the project. Facilitates the allocation of tasks to the developers.
Agile Planning: Use informal, intuitive means such as a corkboard and a deck of story cards.
What is a critical path?
The path with the longest total duration from the project start to the project completion.
What is the objective of risk management?
Aims at reducing the impact of contingencies.
What are the different activities of risk management?
- Risk Identification: Risks can be categorised into univerals project risks and project-specific risks.
- Risk Analysis: Concerned with the extent of damage of each risk, options to deal with risk and cost to implement options.
- Risk Prioritizing: Risks are ranked according to their effects and combined risk exposures.
- Risk Management Planning: Develop strategies to address risk items.
- Risks Resolution: The implementation of the risk reduction techniques specified in the risk management plan.
- Risks Monitoring: Ensures that the risk reduction strategies are implemented and executed according to schedule.
Define Process Improvement
The execution of a software process has to be monitored and data about various aspects of the process including productivitym quality, costs and time to market should be collected and anlaysed to identify strengths weaknesses of the process and the result used to improve the process.
Apply agile principles to software project management.
A collaborative and cooperative approach between all stakeholders is essential.
Active user involvement is imperative. Customer collaboration is valued more than contract negotiation.
Agile development values responding to change over following a plan.
Agile development values individuals and interactions over processes and tools.
Agile development values working software over comprehensive documentation.
Good enough is enough.
