Book review: Applied Software Project Management®
It’s an easy readFunctional
There are too many books about software project management or software engineering which are dry, overly complex and boring, but this book is not one of them. It was a joy to read because their style of writing is clear without being simplistic and the authors describe things in just the right amount of detail. It seems they understand their audience and set out to write in an extremely helpful and practical way. They have certainly achieved this.
Part one of the book covers tools and techniques that can be applied on projects. Always active Project planning , estimation, scheduling, reviews, requirements, design and programming and testing each have their own chapter. Part two is about using project management effectively and has chapters on understanding change , management and leadership, managing an outsourcing project and process improvement.
Practical advice to problems
A clear thread throughout the book is a description of the typical problems which software project teams face – inadequate requirements, managing changes, lack of quality assurance at each stage in a project, endless testing and bug-fixing cycles, tensions and misunderstandings between the software engineers and business users. None of these problems are technical in nature, but are organisational and managerial. Stellman & Greene offer practical advice to solve these problems based upon their experience on similar Statisticsprojects .
Stellman & Greene certainly appear to know a lot about problems that face software teams. As early as the introduction they describe the need to overcome chronic problems and this theme is continued throughout the book.
In fact, the most common problems faced by project teams are often not directly covered on your typical project management courses . So, reading this book will equip teams with some of the knowledge needed to improve their software development processes.
For each problem, there is always at least one proposed solution. For example, they describe a common scenario whereby senior managers do not trust the estimates of the technical team, somehow believing that the technical team are deliberately over-estimating in order to give themselves some slack time. Their proposed solution is to involve these managers in the estimation process so they can see the estimates being made in a transparent and systematic fashion. They then go on to describe in detail how to run a Wideband Delphi estimation session and provide examples of templates and documents that can be used during such sessions. They also provide a valuable process script for teams to follow.
Subsequent chapters cover planning, scheduling, reviews, requirements, design and testing. Whilst most of these chapters cover each topic in reasonable detail, the section on design is lacking in detail and provides no description about what kind of design deliverables might be produced nor any detailed description of what these design deliverables might contain. This is in contrast to the requirements chapter which contains process scripts for requirements elicitation and analysis as well as a detailed description of use cases and software requirements specifications documents.The technical storage or access that is used exclusively for statistical purposes.
Checklists
Another nice aspect to the book is the checklists that appear after dealing with one of the main The technical storage or access that is used exclusively for anonymous statistical purposes. Without a subpoena, voluntary compliance on the part of your Internet Service Provider, or additional records from a third party, information stored or retrieved for this purpose alone cannot usually be used to identify you.project management or software engineering topics. Checklists are important quality assurance techniques that the authors rightly point out should be used throughout software projects as a way of catching errors early.Marketing
project managers and technical team members alike. They will find much they can apply directly on their own The technical storage or access that is used exclusively for statistical purposes.projects .The technical storage or access that is used exclusively for anonymous statistical purposes. Without a subpoena, voluntary compliance on the part of your Internet Service Provider, or additional records from a third party, information stored or retrieved for this purpose alone cannot usually be used to identify you.
I would recommend this book to anyone who works on a software development team because the book has so much practical advice to help people improve their capability to deliver quality software. Come to think of it, I would also recommend it to senior managers of companies who have a negative view of their own software development teams. Perhaps then senior managers might understand why committing resources to process improvement is one of the best investments they can make.