Applied Software Project Management

Features

• Cover Type: Paperback with 322 pages
• Published by: O'Reilly Media, Inc. November 18, 2005
• Written in: English
• ISBN 10 Number: 0596009488
• ISBN 13 Number: 978-0596009489
• Book Dimensions: 9.1 x 7 x 0.9 inches
• Weighs: 1 pounds

Book 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 requirements 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.

About The Author
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 formed Stellman & Greene Consulting in 2003, with a focus on project management, software development, management consulting and software process improvement. They have worked in a wide range of industries, including finance, telecommunications, media, non-profit, entertainment, natural language processing, science and academia. For more information about them and this book, visit http://www.stellman-greene.com. Jennifer Greene has managed quality assurance teams at multiple software organizations. Her project experience spans many domains, including academic research, financial services and analysis, natural language processing and grants management. She has been responsible for leading process improvement efforts as well as implementing best practices in defect prevention. She is currently leading a major software test outsourcing effort for MicroEdge.

Reader Reviews
I found this to be an excellent book on software project management. Many of the project management books I have picked up have been either too theory-based or not relevant to the day-to-day problems that exist in software development. I found this book both relevant and practical. This book is divided into two sections. The first section discusses the tools involved in software project management, while the second section discusses how to actually manage a software project effectively. The first section goes through all the tools required to effective manage a software project. The authors dedicate entire chapters to SOW creation, estimation, scheduling, coding (including a discussion on source control providers), and testing. In each chapter, not only do the authors describe the process, but in certain cases, they provide tips to help things go smoother. For example, in the chapter on estimation, the authors provide several different ways to accurately estimate project tasks. I found many of these additional tips very helpful. In the second section of the book, the authors discuss how to effectively manage a software development team using the tools discussed in section one. The authors don't specifically use the word "agile", but I found that most of section two became a discussion on agile practices. Again, the word "agile" was never used, however, I found it both interesting and refreshing to hear a book on project management discussing how to be adaptable to change. I was very pleased with this book. I thought it was a realistic and well-thought out book on software project management. This book goes a long way toward arming someone with the tools they need to effectively manage a software development project. Comment | | (Report this)