Applied Software Project Management (Paperback)

Description

"If you're looking for solid, easy-to-follow advice on estimation, requirements gathering, managing change, and more, you can stop now: this is the book for you."
--Scott Berkun, Author of The Art of Project Management

What makes software projects succeed? It takes more than a good idea and a team of talented programmers. A project manager needs to know how to guide the team through the entire software project. There are common pitfalls that plague all software projects and rookie mistakes that are made repeatedly--sometimes by the same people! Avoiding these pitfalls is not hard, but it is not necessarily intuitive. Luckily, there are tried and true techniques that can help any project manager.

In Applied Software Project Management, Andrew Stellman and Jennifer Greene provide you with tools, techniques, and practices that you can use on your own projects right away. This book supplies you with the information you need to diagnose your team's situation and presents practical advice to help you achieve your goal of building better software.

Topics include:

• Planning a software project
  
• Helping a team estimate its workload
  
• Building a schedule
  
• Gathering software requirements and creating use cases
  
• Improving programming with refactoring, unit testing, and version control
  
• Managing an outsourced project
  
• Testing software

Jennifer Greene and Andrew Stellman have been building software together since 1998. Andrew comes from a programming background and has managed teams of requirements analysts, designers, and developers. Jennifer has a testing background and has managed teams of architects, developers, and testers. She has led multiple large-scale outsourced projects. Between the two of them, they have managed every aspect of software development. They have worked in a wide range of industries, including finance, telecommunications, media, nonprofit, entertainment, natural-language processing, science, and academia. For more information about them and this book, visit http://www.stellman-greene.com.

 

Table of Contents

Preface

1. Introduction

     Tell Everyone the Truth All the Time

     Trust Your Team

     Review Everything, Test Everything

     All Software Engineers Are Created Equal

     Doing the Project Right Is Most Efficient
     Part I: Tools and Techniques

     Part II: Using Project Management Effectively

Part One. Tools and Techniques 1

Software Project Planning

     Understand the Project Needs

     Create the Project Plan

     Diagnosing Project Planning Problems

3. Estimation

     Elements of a Successful Estimate

     Wideband Delphi Estimation

     Other Estimation Techniques

     Diagnosing Estimation Problems

4. Project Schedules

     Building the Project Schedule

     Managing Multiple Projects

     Use the Schedule to Manage Commitments

     Diagnosing Scheduling Problems

5. Reviews

     Inspections

     Deskchecks

     Walkthroughs

     Code Reviews

     Pair Programming

     Use Inspections to Manage Commitments

     Diagnosing Review Problems

6. Software Requirements

     Requirements Elicitation

     Use Cases

     Software Requirements Specification

     Change Control

     Introduce Software Requirements Carefully

     Diagnosing Software Requirements Problems

7. Design and Programming

     Review the Design

     Version Control with Subversion

     Refactoring

     Unit Testing

     Use Automation

     Be Careful with Existing Projects

     Diagnosing Design and Programming Problems

8. Software Testing

     Test Plans and Test Cases

     Test Execution

     Defect Tracking and Triage

     Test Environment and Performance Testing

     Smoke Tests

     Test Automation

     Postmortem Reports

     Using Software Testing Effectively

     Diagnosing Software Testing Problems

Part Two. Using Project Management Effectively

9. Understanding Change

     Why Change Fails

     How to Make Change Succeed

10. Management and Leadership

     Take Responsibility

     Do Everything Out in the Open

     Manage the Organization

     Manage Your Team

11. Managing an Outsourced Project

     Prevent Major Sources of Project Failure

     Management Issues in Outsourced Projects

     Collaborate with the Vendor

12. Process Improvement

     Life Without a Software Process

     Software Process Improvement

     Moving Forward

Bibliography

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