Lawrence Peters

Software Project Management: Learning from Our Mistakes [Voice of Evidence]

Software project management antipatterns can help practitioners identify and avoid practices that will hinder success. This article provides a consolidated list of such antipatterns and discusses their implications.

Educating software engineering managers: revisited: what software project managers need to know today

In 2003, the original paper with this title was published as part of CSEET 2003. It focused on resolving communication issues between software project managers and developers and introduced a corporate strategy based means of evaluating software engineers. Now, more than a decade later, we could benefit from what we have learned in other fields about managing people involved in knowledge work and how to improve our success in software development. But are we? This paper is intended to present what Software Engineering students can be taught today that will help them to be successful as software project managers now and in the future. It is based on the premise that effective software project managers are not born but made through education.

Enriching traditional software engineering curricula with software project management knowledge

Training existing and future software project managers presents a challenge to the academic community. Software project management is usually taught as part of software engineering bachelor or master programs which are generally based on SWEBOK. However, evidence shows that even when SWEBOK provides some software project management knowledge it is not enough to satisfy the software industry requirements. On the other hand, the Software Extension to the PMBOK Guide was recently published. The extension complements the original PMBOK with software specific contents, so it constitutes valuable referential information for software project managers. This paper describes a smooth transition to enrich our traditional software engineering curricula based on SWEBOK with specific software project management knowledge. To that end, we identify which software project management knowledge suggested by the Software Extension to the PMBOK provides special added value to the SWEBOK contents. The results can be useful for academia but also for software engineering practitioners that can identify training opportunities to complement their SWEBOK background.

Evaluating Software Project Managers: A Multidimensional Perspective

A qualified and motivated project manager is a key factor in a software project’s success. Thus, getting the most out of those managers is important. Feedback is a critical part of this process. With this in mind, this article recommends the best practices for evaluating software project managers.

Software Project Management Fallacies

Software project management plays a critical role in software projects. Therefore, software project management actions have an important impact on software projects and organizations. However, software engineers often become software project managers with little or no training in project management. As a result, sometimes they have to rely on hearsay or their own assumptions to formulate strategies and a plan of action for managing software projects. This has led to several software project management misconceptions or fallacies that can have important negative effects on software projects. This paper examines some relevant fallacies based, on the authors’ experience and discusses published material which refutes them. This work contributes to the practice of Software Project Management by identifying and correcting practices which can reduce the success rate of software projects.

Notations For Software Specification And Design (Panel Discussion)

Software development involves the accomplishment of distinct functions such as problem definition, requirements engineering, system architecture design, etc. The major ingredients contributing to the accomplishment are creativeness, a level of experience, and a formal or informal methodology. To that end, a methodology can be thought of as the sum of four parts: (1) a collection of basic ideas containing a certain spirit or viewpoint (principles), (2) techniques which apply the basic ideas, (3) a set of tools for employing the techniques to the “real-world” problems, and (4) an overall procedure describing when to use the tools and techniques. The concept of a notation (graphical, linguistic, or tabular mechanism used for displaying or formulating ideas) is the keystone to the utilization of a methodology. The objective of this session is to deepen our understanding of the role of notations in the areas of requirements engineering and software design.