Software Project Management Research Papers (original) (raw)

Context: Development of software-intensive products and services increasingly occurs by continuously deploying product or service increments, such as new features and enhancements, to customers. Product and service developers must continuously find out what customers want by direct customer feedback and usage behaviour observation. Objective: This paper examines the preconditions for setting up an experimentation system for continuous customer experiments. It describes the RIGHT model for Continuous Experimentation (Rapid Iterative value creation Gained through High-frequency Testing), illustrating the building blocks required for such a system. Method: An initial model for continuous experimentation is analytically derived from prior work. The model is matched against empirical case study findings from two startup companies and further developed. Results: Building blocks for a continuous experimentation system and infrastructure are presented. Conclusions: A suitable experimentation system requires at least the ability to release minimum viable products or features with suitable

- by
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- Computer Science, Software Engineering, User Experience (UX), Lean Thinking

Association rule mining is a significant research topic in the knowledge discovery area. In the last years a great number of algorithms have been proposed with the objective of solving diverse drawbacks presented in the generation of association rules. One of the main problems is to obtain interesting rules from continuous numeric attributes. In this paper, a method for mining quantitative association rules is proposed. It deals with the problem of discretizing continuous data in order to discover a manageable number of high confident association rules, which cover a high percentage of examples in the data set. The method was validated by applying it to data from software project management metrics.

A project manager (PM) plays a vital role in the organisation. Project managers are the hidden heroes of the companies. Project managers have numerous jobs and responsibilities in the firm. PM monitors all of these variables so that the team can emphasise the precise tasks at the right time and acclimate as needed. In addition, project managers supervise project planning and implementation; they ensure that the project's general goals are finished on time and its following errands and milestones match the business's strategy. Further, when unexpected obstacles occur, they are the ones who can get everything back on track. As a result, project managers face a lot of psychosocial stressors in their workplaces. The psychosocial stressors impact the performance of the project manager adversely. Psychosocial stressors include how work is accomplished, such as deadlines, high workload, work methods, and relationships with supervisors, co-workers, and customers. On the other hand, sometimes, these psychosocial stressors motivate the project manager, such as deadlines and relationships with supervisors, resulting in higher performance. Furthermore, machine learning is essential as it helps the project manager organise the project's data; it is also helpful in strategic decision making. The impact of ML on the performance of the project manager is fruitful. ML helps project managers create tedious status reports and messy resource scheduling more quickly and efficiently. This study aims to examine the role and impact of machine learning on PM performance. Along with this, the paper also investigates the role and impact of psychosocial stress on project manager performance. Different researchers and authors' articles were used for this study. Secondary data have been researched upon with the help of various reports, articles, reviews and previous research studies.

'Knowledge'is one of the main outcomes systematic approaches of software engineering. It is considered as a crucial resource of each organization and, therefore, needs to be managed carefully especially for the software... more

- by M. Kudus and +1
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- Software Engineering, Knowledge Management, Software Project Management, Best practice

Recent years have witnessed a surge in self-organizing voluntary teams collaborating online to produce goods and services. Motivated by this phenomenon, this research investigates how these teams are formed and how individuals make decisions about which teams to join in the context of open source software development (OSSD). The focus of this paper is to explore how the collaborative network affects developers' choice of newly initiated OSS projects to participate in. More specifically, by analyzing software project data from real-world OSSD projects, we empirically test the impact of past collaborative ties with and perceived status of project members in the network on the self-assembly of OSSD teams. Overall, we find that a developer is more likely to join a project when he has strong collaborative ties with its initiator. We also find that perceived status of the noninitiator members of a project influences its probability of attracting developers. We discuss the implications of our results with respect to self-organizing teams and OSSD.

- by Jungpil Hahn
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- Information Systems, Marketing, Software Development, Software Project Management

Software Engineering is the process of systematic, disciplined, quantifiable approach that has significant impact on large-scale and complex software development. Scores of well-established software process models have long been adopted in the software development life cycle that pour stakeholders towards the completion of final software products development. Within the boundary of advanced technology, various emerging and futuristic technology is evolving that really need the attention of software engineering community whether the conventional software process techniques are capable to inherit the core fundamental into the futuristic software development. In this paper, we study the impact of existing software engineering process and models including waterfall, Agile, and DevOps in Blockchain-Oriented Software Engineering. We also examine the essentiality of adopting state-of-art concepts and evolving the current software engineering process for blockchain-oriented systems. We discuss the insight of software project management practices in BOS development. The findings of this study indicate that utilizing state-of-art techniques in software process for futuristic technology would be challenging

- by Md Jobair Hossain Faruk and +2
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- Software Engineering, Software Project Management, Software Process Improvement, Software Process

Software project managers play an important role in selecting their software development process. In this study we conducted a survey of software project managers about software process change. The result of the survey revealed several factors affecting this type of decision making. It also revealed critical issues in software development projects. In particular, the findings point to the importance of a piloting strategy in technology transfer, as well as the importance of highlighting cost, quality, and schedule information in reporting evidence of a new technique's effectiveness. We expect that the findings of this study could facilitate research on technology transfer and adoption.

We propose a log-based analysis tool for evaluating web application computer system. A feature of the tool is an integration software log with infrastructure log. Software engineers alone can resolve system faults in the tool, even if the faults are complicated by both software problems and infrastructure problems. The tool consists of 5 steps: preparation software, preparation infrastructure, collecting logs, replaying the log data, and tracing the log data. The tool was applied to a simple web application system in a small-scale local area network. We confirmed usefulness of the tool when a software engineer detects faults of the system failures such as " 404 " and " no response " errors. In addition, the tool was partially applied to a real large-scale computer system with many web applications and large network environment. Using the replaying and the tracing in the tool, we found causes of a real authentication error. The causes were combined an infrastructure problem with a software problem. Even if the failure is caused by not only a software problem but also an infrastructure problem, we confirmed that software engineers alone could distinguish between a software problem and an infrastructure problem using the tool.

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An introductory course on Software Engineering remains one of the hardest
subjects to teach largely because of the wide range of topics the area encompasses.
I have believed for some time that we often tend to teach too many
concepts and topics in an introductory course resulting in shallow knowledge
and little insight on application of these concepts. And Software Engineering
is finally about application of concepts to efficiently engineer good software
solutions.

- by Camilo Vargas
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- Business, Business Administration, Computer Science, Software Engineering

The selection of an appropriate software project management tool, as in the selection of many other tools, is often approached using an ad hoc process. Such non-rigorous approaches often based on personal preference, intuition, or marketing hype, can lead to an erroneous result. In this paper a rigorous model for selecting a software project management tool using the Analytical Hierarchy Process (AHP) is presented. The AHP provides a flexible, systematic, and repeatable evaluation procedure that can easily be understood by the decision maker in selecting the appropriate software project management tool. Several relevant factors based on the most common features offered by commercial off-the-shelf solutions (COTS) are used as the selection criteria in ranking the software project management tools. The contribution of this work is to apply a well-known decision making procedure in a novel way to help decision makers better identify an appropriate software project management tool without having to go through a more extensive evaluation process. In addition, this work establishes a framework for comparing individual product decisions across projects, project managers, organizational groups, and organizations.

- by Pierre Dietrichsen
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- Software Engineering, Decision Making, Project Management, Risk Management

Traditionally, a project should deliver agreed upon functionality on time and within budget. This study examines the mindset of software development project managers in regard to how they 'define' a successful project in order to arrive at a richer perspective of 'success' from the perspective of project managers. Senior management and members of the development team can gain a better understanding of the perspective of project managers regarding some of the aspects of their work and the project as a whole. Such understanding can facilitate better communication and cooperation among these groups. We investigated components of the developed system (project) in terms of some of the aspects of the delivered system (outcome/project) in order to place traditional measures of success in context with other organizational/managerial measures that have been suggested in the literature. We also investigated specific work-related items. These items have potential implications for the intrinsic motivation of the project manager. The consensus among the project managers who participated in our study indicated that delivering a system that meets customer/user requirements and works as intended through work that provides a sense quality and personal achievement are important aspects that lead to a project being considered a success.

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- by Buzz Techy
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- Software Engineering, Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning, Software Development

This study explores how to integrate software project management risk into bidding risk, and makes use of life cycle management theory to study risk avoidance in bidding for software projects. The stages in the life cycle of software projects and main risk items are introduced. As many types of risk items exist in the bidding, we analyze the possible risk response measures for different risk categories and the measures' corresponding strength. Finally, we describe the basic methodology for dynamic risk avoidance in bidding for software projects based on life cycle management theory and give an example.

- by Kin Keung Lai
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- Computer Science, Project Management, Software Project Management, Bidding

It is no secret that many projects fail, regardless of the business sector, software projects are notoriously disaster victims, not necessarily because of technological failure, but more often due to their uncertainties. The threats identified by uncertainty in day-to-day of a project are real and immediate and the stakes in a project are often high. This paper presents a systematic review about software project management uncertainties. It helps to identify the difficulties and the actions that can minimize the uncertainties effects in the projects and how managers and teams can prepare themselves for the challenges of their projects scenario, with the aim of contributing to the improvement of project management in organizations as well as contributing to project success.

University College Cork (College of Business and Law (CBL) under their CBL Development Award scheme)

Project management is one very critical task of development activity. Project management is traditionally defined as the discipline of planning, organizing, and managing activities and resources for successful execution and completion of project goals and objectives. In this respect, project management holds a key position in satisfactory completion of projects. Project management for software holds the same importance in software development. That is the reason that we have a complete knowledge domain we know as software project management (SPM). Software project management aims to achieve all the project goals and objectives while working within the constraints posed by project environment and stakeholders. These constraints include (but not limited to) time, scope, resources, resource allocation and optimization etc. While managing software projects, it is natural to be confronted with various conflicts of different natures. A good project management activity is one which can eff...

7th International Conference on Software Engineering (SOFT 2021) will provide an excellent
international forum for sharing knowledge and results in theory, methodology and applications of
Software Engineering and Applications. The goal of this Conference is to bring together researchers
and practitioners from academia and industry to focus on understanding Modern software
engineering concepts and establishing new collaborations in these areas.

According to the recent surveys, software projects are
still failing significantly. The projects are failing due to
management related issues rather than technical issues.
Therefore, improving the quality of software project
management increases the odds of success. One of the
ways to increase the quality is the effective use of
project management tools. In this paper, we introduce
PROMOL, a formal and visual software project
management modeling lanaguage. PROMOL
distinguishes itself from other project management
tools with being visual, formal and able to address
various aspects of project management at the same
time. We also provide a simple example to illustrate the
use of modeling language.

Although user participation in systems development is widely believed to have positive impacts on user acceptance, it does not guarantee success and there is still much that we do not know about how and why user participation sometimes delivers positive benefits, but not always. Much of the prior research on user participation assumes that user–developer communication will ensure that the resulting system will be designed to meet users’ needs and will be accepted by them. The nature and quality of the communication between users and developers, however, remains an understudied aspect of user participation. In this paper, we focus on the user–developer communication process. We propose a process model that delineates four stages of communication between users and software developers, and we argue that these stages must occur for user participation to lead to effective outcomes. To illustrate our model, we apply it to analyse a ‘critical case study’ of a software project that failed despite high levels of user involvement. We show that when ‘communication lapses’ occurred in several of the user–developer communication stages, developers failed to be informed regarding the underlying reasons that users avoided the system. Based on the insights from this case study, we advise researchers and practitioners how to leverage the potential benefits of user participation, rather than take them for granted.

- by Mark Keil
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- Information Systems, Engineering, Computer Science, Software Development

This article reports the results of research into software project management. the main contribution of this research is a software project management framework that consists of a static structure, shown in an entity-relationship diagram, and a description of each component of the framework. It also describes the procedure to design and validate the framework. This consists of integrating the solutions

This paper presents an approach to estimate the savings from implementing negotiation in requirements elicitation process. The aim of implementing negotiation is to minimize the possibility of introducing defects during the creation of requirements and to decrease later effort required to fix requirements defects. An empirical evaluation study is adopted through a role play experiment to evaluate the benefit of exercising negotiation. The net-gain and the return-oninvestment show positive value which suggest that negotiation activities worth an investment. Based on the return-oninvestment of 197 percent in average, this paper suggests that negotiation is a useful prevention activity to inhibit defects from occurring during the creation of requirements.

Six Sigma has been adopted by many software development organizations to identify problems in software projects and processes, find optimal solutions for the identified problems, and quantitatively improve the development processes so as to achieve organizations' business goals. A Six Sigma framework for software process improvements is needed to provide a standard process and analysis tools for Six Sigma project executions, and also provide a platform for collaborations with other process improvement approaches, such as PSP/TSP and CMM/CMMI. However, few frameworks have been proposed to support Six Sigma project executions. Most of Six Sigma projects for software process improvements have been performed in an ad-hoc way. In this paper, we propose a framework to support Six Sigma projects for continuous process improvements for software developments. Based on this framework, we implemented a web-based tool, called SSPMT integrated with a software project management tool and a PSP supporting tool. The suggested framework and SSPMT is beneficial in initiating and executing Six Sigma projects, facilitating data collection and data analyses by Six Sigma toolkits, and standardizing the Six Sigma project execution process so as to achieve Six Sigma project goals and of organizations' business goals.

- by Ho-jin Choi
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- Software Development, Six Sigma, Software Project Management, Process Improvement

Agile has invented to improve and overcome Draw backs of software development. Now agile model is using in software development very vastly. It is facilitating the developer and client both very resourcefully. It is getting popularity than the other Software Development Life Cycle models because of its characteristics and most owing to allow change request at any level of the project. The client in the software development is the main part and asset of the company. The software house always focuses on its client because client is an asset. Thus developer has major concern with the client's requirement and change request. Agile is getting popularity because of allow change request at any stage of project, on the other hand it is also a drawback in agile model because when project starts the project's completion time and cost is decided. But due to frequent change of requests come from client the cost and completion time both increase eventually which is not good for software house's business and reputation. So there is need a cost and time estimation technique to solve change request issue in agile model.

Anecdotal evidence suggests that project managers (PMs) sometime provide biased status reports to management. In our research project we surveyed PMs to explore possible motivations for bias, the frequency with which bias occurs, and the strength of the bias typically applied. We found that status reports were biased 60% of the time and that the bias was twice as likely to be optimistic as pessimistic. By applying these results to an information-theoretic model, we estimated that only about 10-15% of biased project status reports were, in fact, accurate and these occurred only when pessimistic bias offset project management status errors. There appeared to be no significant difference in the type or frequency of bias applied to high-risk versus low-risk projects. Our work should provide a better understanding of software project status reporting. #

- by Linda Wallace
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- Information Systems, Information Theory, Information Management, Project Management

Risk-based testing is an approach that consists of a set of activities regarding risk factors identification related to software requirements. Once identified, the risks are prioritized according to its likelihood and impact, and the test cases are projected based on the strategies for treatment of the identified risk factors. Then, test efforts are continuously adjusted according the risk monitoring. Most risk-based testing approaches focuses on activities related to risk identification, analysis and prioritizing. However, metrics are fundamental as they quantify characteristics of a process or product and support software project management activities. In this light, this paper proposes and discusses risk-based testing metrics to measure and control test cases and test activities progress, efforts and costs.

The realization of modern business, activities and projects poses increasing demands and challenges to project managers. Therefore, modern project management practices are inconceivable without the help of project management software. This paper describes and compares the most commonly used project management software with emphasis on the need for careful selection based on the required software features and other criteria such as software price, necessary implementation time and education of future users and an example of Microsoft Project application in project planning.

Hybride Projektmanagementmethoden kombinieren Techniken aus agilen und klassischen Ansätzen. Auf Basis einer Onlinestudie wurden Ursachen für den Einsatz hybrider Methoden in der Softwareentwicklungsbranche analysiert. Es zeigte sich, dass die Ursachen für die Verwendung hybrider Ansätze sowohl in Problemen agiler und klassischer Ansätze liegen, als auch in den speziellen Vorteilen, die hybride Methoden bieten.

The software product development involves different stakeholders such as suppliers, vendors, customers, project development team, senior management and functional managers. The project manager is very much dependent on external stakeholders such as vendors. Vendor selection, contract preparation, different types of contracts, monitoring the progress, contract closure and the role of vendor in the entire project life cycle are discussed in this paper. The steps in vendor management process are clearly explained. The advantages and disadvantages of different types of contracts are discussed. The questions arise when a project manager chooses a vendor are specified. Overall the importance of vendor management and the role of vendors in software projects have been discussed based on the literature review of the project management standards and related literature. The lack of vendor support may lead to project failure. This is evident from the project management literature.

Abstract. The reluctance to report bad news about a project and its status is a known problem in software project management that can contribute to project failure. The reluctance to report bad news is heightened when it bears personal risks. Oftentimes, those who report bad news end up losing face. In extreme cases, they not only lose face, but may end up on the unemployment line. The need to preserve face is a powerful influence on social behaviour. While universal, it manifests itself differently in different cultures. To date, there have been no empirical studies of the extent to which culturally constituted views of face-saving affect reporting of bad news on software projects. This is a particularly important topic given the increased prevalence of global, dispersed software development teams and offshore outsourcing of software development. In this study, we conducted a role-playing experiment in the USA and in South Korea, to investigate the effect of culturally constituted views of face-saving on the willingness to report bad news regarding a software development project. A blame-shifting opportunity was chosen as the means to operationalize face-saving in a culturally sensitive fashion. The two countries were chosen because they differ markedly in their views of face-saving and the relative importance ascribed to two important aspects of face: lian and mianzi. Results reveal that the presence of a blame-shifting opportunity had a significant effect on US subjects’ willingness to report bad news, but the effect on Korean subjects was not found to be statistically significant. In the absence of a blame-shifting opportunity, we did not observe any significant differences between US and Korean subjects in willingness to report bad news. The implications of these findings are discussed.

Requirements are changed very often throughout the development phase. Nearly it is not possible to reject the changes in requirements . Different software development approaches tackle changing requirement in different ways. Unlike Waterfall or document driven approaches of software development, agile methodologies welcome change during the course of software development but at the same time manage the changes in a sys tematic manner. This paper focuses on the requirement change management and will highlight the various aspects of change management in agile that illustrates that change management isn’t an easy job even under the umbrella of agile.

Context: To meet the growing need for education in Software Project Management, educational games have been introduced as a beneficial instructional strategy. However, there are no low-cost board games openly available to teach Earned Value Management (EVM) in computing programs. Objective: This paper presents an educational board game to reinforce and teach the application of EVM concepts in the context of undergraduate computing programs complementing expository lessons on EVM basics. Method: The game has been developed based on project management fundamentals and teaching experience in this area. So far, it has been applied in two project management courses in undergraduate computing programs at the Federal University of Santa Catarina. We evaluated motivation, user experience and the game's contribution to learning through case studies on Kirkpatrick's level one based on the perception of the students. Results: First results of the evaluation of the game indicate a perceived potential of the game to contribute to the learning of EVM concepts and their application. The results also point out a very positive effect of the game on social interaction, engagement, immersion, attention and relevance to the course objectives. Conclusion: We conclude that the game DELIVER! can contribute to the learning of the EVM on the cognitive levels of remembering, understanding and application. The illustration of the application of EVM through the game can motivate its usefulness. The game has proven to be an engaging instructional strategy, keeping students on the task and attentive. In this respect, the game offers a possibility to complement traditional instructional strategies for teaching EVM. In order to further generalize and to strengthen the validity of the results, it is important to obtain further evaluations.

In this report we propose a solution to problem of the dependency on the experience of the software project quality assurance personnel by providing a transparent, objective and measurement based quality framework. The framework helps the quality assurance experts making objective and comparable decisions in software projects by defining and assessing measurable quality goals and thresholds, directly relating these to an escalation mechanism. First results of applying the proposed measurement based software quality framework in a real life case study are also addressed in this report.

- by Gábor Bényász and +2
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- Quality Management, Project Management, Software Process Improvement and Assessment, Agile Project Management

Software project management

- by Dhruvin bhatt
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- Software Project Management

The iCFai university group, plot# 65, nagarjuna hills, punjagutta, hyderabad, india -500082, purna24@hotmail.com Offshore project success is very much important to both customer and the vendor. based on very less success rate of overall software projects globally, critical success factors (CsFs) for offshore software projects is gaining much importance. in the current study based on literature review, a total of 75 success factors for offshore software projects are identified. Further based on their appearance in literature 20 critical success factors from 10 CsF categories are identified. Finally top six most critical success factors for offshore software projects such as trust, efficient communication, cultural understanding, relationship between client and vendor, contract type and efficient knowledge transfer are identified. The CsFs categories are prioritized in the order of importance. The important CsF categories for offshore projects found are organizational factors (both client and vendor), project factors, cultural factors and environmental factors.

Software development is an industry sector which is typified by rapid change and iterative progress. In consequence a number of project management frameworks exist within the field of software development. Some of these have been developed from existing models taken from other industry sectors and some have emerged over time in response to the rapidly changing needs of software developers and their supporting project teams. This research specifically examined two particular frameworks which are popularly used within software development, the Project Management Maturity (PMM) framework and the Capability Maturity Model Integration (CMMI) framework. This research critically compares and contrasts the two and proposes a synthesized framework which draws upon the best elements of both of these models to create an agile framework which encourages best practice and technical precision within software projects. It is determined that a synthesized framework reduces the risks inherent in pro...

- by Dr. Tariq Rahim Soomro
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- Project Management, Multidisciplinary, Software Project Management, CMMI
- by Claudia Banchoff
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- Engineering, Software Project Management, CMMI

There may be dozens of deviations from a software development project plan. One example is delays in planned schedule. A project manager must decide how to handle them as any delay requires some action on the part of manager. The choices of software project managers are rather limited. First of all, right engineering talent can help. Thus temporarily reassigning senior engineers to a part of project that is suffering can be a viable option. Another option is requirement scrubbing as sometimes requirements are not essential and hence not needed. Therefore, such unnecessary requirements must be cut off. It is quiet possible that both strategies give no appropriate solution. In such circumstances best approach is to admit incorrectness of the original plans and schedule, and revise the schedule on the basis of new knowledge. This paper presents an iterative scheduling technique to help managers in such situations. Clearly, more severe are the consequences of a delay in schedule, the mo...

- by JAVED IQBAL
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- Computer Science, Software Engineering, Project Management, Iterative Methods

Increasingly, software projects are becoming geographically distributed, with limited face-toface interaction between participants. These projects face particular challenges that need careful managerial attention. This PhD study reports on how we can understand and support the management of distributed software projects, based on a literature study and a case study. The main emphasis of the literature study was on how to support the management of distributed software projects, but also contributed to an understanding of these projects. The main emphasis of the case study was on how to understand the management of distributed software projects, but also contributed to supporting the management of these projects.
The literature study integrates what we know about risks and risk-resolution techniques, into a framework for managing risks in distributed contexts. This framework was developed iteratively, using evaluations by practitioners. Subsequently, the framework served as the foundation for the design of a risk management process, compliant with Capability Maturity Model Integration’s (CMMI) generic approach to risk management (2006).
The case study investigates the managerial challenges of control and coordination in a successful, distributed software project between a Russian and a Danish company. The case study’s control aspects were investigated, drawing on Kirsch’s (2004) elements of control framework, to analyze how control is enacted in the project. This analysis showed that informal measurement and evaluation controls were used even though the team was short-lived and rarely met face-to-face; in addition, informal roles and relationships, such as clanlike control, were also used. The investigation suggests that management in successful distributed software projects can be highly reliant on both formal and informal controls and in both a project context and mediated communications. The case study’s coordination aspects were investigated, drawing on the collective mind concept, developed by Weick and Roberts (1993), to analyze the patterns of mediated interactions in multimodal communication. This analysis showed that multimodal communication can facilitate collective minding in distributed software projects and can positively impact performance. In providing an approach for investigating the impact of multimodal communication practices on virtual team performance, we can further understand and support coordination in distributed software projects.

El texto incluye una aproximación práctica de la administración de proyectos desde una perspectiva de metodología ágil, explica a un nivel profesionista o técnico los procesos de un proyecto y le da una visión de 360º al mismo, integrando conceptos básicos de la ingeniería de software, de administración tradicional y ágil de proyectos, de liderazgo, de comunicación y de ética.

- by Daniel Trejo Medina and +3
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- Software Engineering, Agile Project Management, Software Project Management, Ingenieria de software