The Software Project Manager's Handbook: Principles That Work at Work - Softcover

Phillips, Dwayne

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0471674206 ISBN 13: 9780471674207

Publisher: Wiley-IEEE Computer Society Pr, 2004

Synopsis

Software project managers and their team members work individually towards a common goal. This book guides both, emphasizing basic principles that work at work. Software at work should be pleasant and productive, not just one or the other.

This book emphasizes software project management at work. The author's unique approach concentrates on the concept that success on software projects has more to do with how people think individually and in groups than with programming. He summarizes past successful projects and why others failed. Visibility and communication are more important than SQL and C. The book discusses the technical and people aspects of software and how they relate to one another.

The first part of the text discusses four themes: (1) people, process, product, (2) visibility, (3) configuration management, and (4) IEEE Standards. These themes stress thinking, organization, using what others have built, and people. The second part describes the software management principles of process, planning, and risk management. Part three discusses software engineering principles, the technical aspects of software projects. The fourth part examines software practices giving practical meaning to the individual topics covered in the preceding chapters. The final part of this book continues these practical aspects by illustrating a sample project through seven distinctive documents.

About this title

From the Back Cover:

Bring a new level of effectiveness to your software projects

Remember when creating software was fun? It could be again, if you use the methods in this book to help you plan and manage your project. In this new edition of The Software Project Manager’s Handbook, expert Dwayne Phillips outlines the fundamental principles that project managers and software practitioners can use to help them succeed on any project.

Success on software projects has more to do with how people think individually and in groups than with programming, asserts Phillips. In clear and concise steps, he shows software project managers and their team members how to manage projects effectively by paying attention to four basic principles:

• Balancing people, process, and product
• Making ideas visible
• Applying configuration management properly
• Using standards

The book describes the requirements, planning, and risk management stages of the development cycle and examines the middle and late stages of development including design, test and integration, and maintenance. Phillips shares proven methods for dealing with common stumbling blocks for managers such as customers who want a voice in the design and endless test-fix cycles, and for planning maintenance so the customer is not left out of the process.

Finally, the author examines past projects in detail–demonstrating why some projects were successful and why others failed. Phillips helps you apply these lessons with a "cookbook" formula that walks you step-by-step through a Waterfall, an Evolutionary, and a Spiral project.

New material added to each chapter covers current issues including the role of process in software projects and the Agile Methods. The Software Project Manager’s Handbook, Second Edition is the most innovative and up-to-date guide to making every software project a complete and painless success.

About the Author:

DWAYNE PHILLIPS has worked as a software and systems engineer with the U.S. government since 1980. He has a PhD in Electrical and Computer Engineering from Louisiana State University. Phillips is the coauthor, with Roy O’Bryan, of It Sounded Good When We Started (published by Wiley-IEEE Computer Society) and author of Image Processing in C as well as several dozen articles for computer magazines.

About this edition

• Publisher: Wiley-IEEE Computer Society Pr
• Publication date: 2004
• ISBN 10: 0471674206
• ISBN 13: 9780471674207
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 2
• Number of pages: 504