A Generic Agent Framework to Support the Various Software Project Management Processes

Favorable planed management is the base of software project succeed. In this piece aim at the present situation of software project management, comprehensive use the thought of software engineering and project management, explore process and method of project schedule planning control. On the base of analysis software project schedule planning control difficulties, research based on PSP method. PSP follow adjustment, practice, measurement, comparison result and readjustment such a circulation and the continuous improvement of process, it is a process step by step for a long time. This paper studies the successful application of content; it can change insufficient plan in software project management process, the phenomenon of control adverse, improve comprehensive management ability and competitive power of project, creating Value for software company, improve high quality service for user.

Due to globalisation, advances in computing technologies, as well as the deployment of software projects in distributed, collaborative and virtual environments, the software project management environment has changed. Traditional project management methods fail to address these added complexities. As a result, numerous software development projects either do not live up to expectations or they fail outright. The authors proposed the software project management model, entitled software project management supported by software agents (SPMSA) that aims to enhance software project management by taking the unique nature and changing environment of software projects into account. The SPMSA model supports the entire spectrum of software project management functionality, supporting and enhancing each key function with a team of software agents. In this extended paper, the authors adapt the SPMSA model to incorporate PMBOK2004 guidelines. The SPMSA model makes a fresh contribution to enhance software project management by utilising software agent technology.

Context: In software project management, the decision-making process is a complex set of tasks largely based on human relations and individual knowledge and cultural background. The factors that affect the decisions of the software project managers (SPMs) as well as their potential consequences require attention because project delays and failures might be related to a series of poor decisions. Goals: To understand how SPMs make decisions based on how they interpret their experiences in the workplace. Further, to identify antecedents and consequences of those decisions in order to increase the effectiveness of project management. We also aim to refine the research design for future investigations. Method: Semi-structured interviews were carried out with SPMs within a Brazilian large governmental organization and a Brazilian large private organization. Results: We found that decision-making in software project management is based on knowledge sharing in which the SPM acts as a facilitator. This phenomenon is influenced by individual factors, such as experience, knowledge, personality, organizational ability, communication, negotiation, interpersonal relationship and systemic vision of the project and by situational factors such as the autonomy of the SPM, constant feedback and team members' technical competence. Conclusions: Due to the uncertainty and dynamism inherent to software projects, the SPMs focus on making, monitoring and adjusting decisions in an argument-driven way. From the initial relationships among the identified factors, the research design was refined.

An association rule mining method for estimating the impact of project management policies on software quality, development time and effort

Are software projects evaluated using software teams’ success criteria? A systematic literature review

Software Requirements Changes is a typical phenomenon in any software development project. Restricting incoming changes might cause user dissatisfaction and allowing too many changes might cause delay in project delivery. Moreover, the acceptance or rejection of the change requests become challenging for software project managers when these changes are occurred in Software Development Phase. Where in Software Development Phase software artifacts are not in consistent state such as: some of the class artifacts are Fully Developed, some are Half Developed, some are Major Developed, some are Minor Developed and some are Not Developed yet. However, software effort estimation and change impact analysis are the two most common techniques which might help software project managers in accepting or rejecting change requests during Software Development Phase. The aim of this research is to develop a new software change effort estimation model which helps software project manager in estimating the effort for software Requirement Changes during Software Development Phase. Thus, this research has analyzed the existing effort estimation models and change impact analysis techniques for Softwrae Development Phase from the literature and proposed a new software change effort estimation model by combining change impact analysis technique with effort estimation model. Later, the new proposed model has been evaluated by selecting four small size software projects as case selections in applying experimental approch. The experiment results show that the overall Mean Magnitude Relative Error value produced by the new proposed model is under 25%. Hence it is concluded that the new proposed model is applicable in estimating the amount of effort for requirement changes during SDP.

The task of managing software projects is universally plagued by cost and schedule overruns. A fundamental problem in software projects is the presence of unreliable information. In initial information as well as in subsequent status reports. The authors report an experiment that investigates decision making in software projects as exemplars of complex, dynamic environments reactive to the actions of the decision maker. The experiment shows that in coping with unreliable information in such environments, decision makers are susceptible to self-fulfilling prophesies created by the environment, and are prone to demonstrate conservatism. A process tracing extension of the experiment shows that subjects demonstrate a low capacity for handling complexity. The implications of the results for managing software projects and for research in dynamic decision making are discussed.

Software projects have a high risk of cost and schedule overruns, which has been a source of concern for the software engineering community for a long time. One of the challenges in software project management is to make reliable prediction of delays in the context of constant and rapid changes inherent in software projects. This paper presents a novel approach to providing automated support for project managers and other decision makers in predicting whether a subset of software tasks (among the hundreds to thousands of ongoing tasks) in a software project have a risk of being delayed. Our approach makes use of not only features specific to individual software tasks (i.e. local data) -- as done in previous work -- but also their relationships (i.e. networked data). In addition, using collective classification, our approach can simultaneously predict the degree of delay for a group of related tasks. Our evaluation results show a significant improvement over traditional approaches which perform classification on each task independently: achieving 46% -- 97% precision (49% improved), 46% -- 97% recall (28% improved), 56% -- 75% F-measure (39% improved), and 78% -- 95% Area Under the ROC Curve (16% improved).

Software project management is the art and science of planning and leading software projects. It is a subdiscipline of project management in which software projects are planned, monitored and controlled. To ensure that a certain software project is successful is the main responsibility of the project manager. From the point of view of a project manager, a success is defined as: Did the system come in “up to specifications”, in time and on budget? Many factors come into play in deciding the success of the project such as project management, customer involvement etc. In this paper, online survey is used to collect project data about a number of factors upon which the outcome of the project depends. Data mining tools such as Association Rule Mining, Naive Bayes, Decision Tree and Neural networks are used to determine whether a project will be successful or not. In addition to that, it also finds out the most important factors guiding the project to success and determine the changes required to turn an unsuccessful project into a successful one.

Among critical stakeholders of software projects developed in public institutions are software developers and project managers affiliated to sub-contractor companies, who are working onsite at the public institutions. The aim of this study is to determine the effect of working onsite in public software projects for software developers and managers with respect to selected factors. The research is designed as an exploratory and qualitative study. The study participants were 10 software developers, one technical team leader and four project managers, all having long experiences in working on public software projects on client premises. Semi-structured interview technique is employed as the data collection method and “ analysis” was applied on the obtained participant responses. Following this analysis, “key ” approach was used to identify the issues to be further considered. It has been determined that the productivity of software developers working onsite at public institutions is low due to intense requests, shortened time to fulfill these requests, and long duration of authorization processes. Moreover, a finding of the study is that the quality of the developed projects and the motivation of the developers are considered to be low for the same aforementioned reasons. Among the foremost causes for these results are the fact that employees work under two different hierarchical structures one in the public institution and one in the software company, more than one managers assign work and there is an authority confusion between organizational units and people in the public institutions.

Understanding the “90% syndrome” in software project management: A simulation-based case study

This paper presents an empirical research to the relations and dependencies between the fields of software product management and software project management in product software companies. By carrying out interviews and an online survey, we answer several current business issues on the leadership roles of product and project managers within the organizational structure, and provide a definition of software products and software projects based on their dependencies.

This paper concerns the role of human errors in the field of Early Risk assessment in Software Project Management. Researchers have recently begun to focus on human errors in early risk assessment in large software projects; statistics show it to be major components of problems in software over 80% of economic losses are attributed to this problem. There has been comparatively diminutive experimental research on the role of human errors in this context, particularly evident at the organizational level, largely because of reluctance to share information and statistics on security issues in online software application. Grounded theory has been employed to investigate the main root of human errors in online security risks as a research methodology. An open-ended question was asked of 103 information security experts around the globe and the responses used to develop a list of human errors causes by open coding. The paper represents a contribution to our understanding of the causes of human errors in information security contexts. It is also one of the first information security research studies of the kind utilizing Strauss and Glaser's grounded theory approaches together, during data collection phases to achieve the required number of participants' responses and is a significant contribution to the field.

This chapter is designed as the introduction to the book. It provides the motivation for studying software project management as a response to the increasing variety of software development methodologies. The chapter characterizes software projects and presents ten knowledge areas in software project management. This body of knowledge is described in the software edition of the Project Management Body of Knowledge (PMBOK). The chapters of the book are classified in terms of their contribution to these knowledge areas.

Software cost estimation is one of the most challenging activities in software project management. Since the software cost estimation affects almost all activities of software project development such as: biding, planning, and budgeting, the accurate estimation is very crucial to the success of software project management. However, due to the inherent uncertainties in the estimation process and other factors, the accurate estimates are often obtained with great difficulties. Therefore, it is safer to generate interval based estimates with a certain probability over them. In the literature, many approaches have been proposed for interval estimation. In this study, we propose a navel method namely Analogy Based Sampling (ABS) and compare ABS against the well established Bootstrapped Analogy Based Estimation (BABE) which is the only existing variant of analogy based method with the capability to generate interval predictions. The results and comparisons show that ABS could improve the performance of BABE with much higher efficiencies and more accurate interval predictions.