Page 37 - DCAP304_DCAP515_SOFTWARE_PROJECT_MANAGEMENT

Unit 1: Introduction to Software Project Management

application that supports Critical Path Analysis is for example Manage-XPS [CP-MAN-XPS]. Notes
There are certainly many more.

Self Assessment

Fill in the blanks:
5. Project planning is a feature of Project Management, which includes of various .........................
6. Usually Project Planning is believed to be a process of estimating, ................................... and
assigning the projects resources in order to bring an end product of proper quality.
7. Risk Management is a procedure of identifying, analyzing and responding to a
...................................

8. The Project Plan documents all the assumptions, activities, schedule, ...................................
and drives the project.
9. ................................... Management is also essential to accommodate the implementation of
the project at present under development in the production environment.
10. PRINCE2 is a process-based approach for project management providing a simply tailored
and ................................... methodology for the management of all types of projects.

11. The tasks connected in a project network are classically the ................................... elements
of a Work Breakdown Structure.
12. MTA is a software engineering method for evaluating the actual progress of a project in
relation to its ...................................

1.4 Problems with Software Project

The below list of software project failure reasons is not prioritized. Some of the reasons are
claims that were measured by researchers.
The maturity of the software engineering field

 The software engineering field is much younger than the other engineering fields and
that, in time, will get more established.
 The field is young and thus most of the field engineers and managers are also young.
Young people have less experience and therefore tend to fail more.
 Young people are more optimistic and tend to estimate roughly.

Shortage of Knowledge Base

As a comparatively young engineering field, software engineering is short of accumulative
knowledge bases. For example, the well-known gang of four book “Design Patterns: Elements
of Reusable Object-Oriented Software” was first published in late 1994. The book suggests
design patterns to ordinary software design problems and it is one of the well-known knowledge
base materials in the software engineering field. “Software engineering has evolved progressively
from its founding days in the 1940s”, but it is still short of accumulative knowledge base as
opposed to other engineering fields. Another example is OOP (Object Oriented Paradigm). OOP
is considered to be more effectual than the previous procedural paradigm. OOP was only
embraced by the Software industry in the 1990s. “Even though it originated in the 1960s, OOP
was not generally used in mainstream software application development until the 1990s.”

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