Essays 2007

Abstract:Effective, time-optimized scheduling is a key attribute of a successfully accomplished team project. A specific attribute of this kind of project is that team members - students have unequal and inhomogeneous individual time resources they can use for the work on project. In comparison with relatively flat "time packages" that a software company can calculate with while making both short-time and long-time schedules, the time available for the student's schoolwork is "scattered" throughout individual courses. Which planning model should be used so that it takes into consideration these constantly changing time resources of the team members? This essay deals with project planning by using guidelines and practices of the process "Team Software Process", mainly discussing properties of the planning systems in the context above.

Abstract:The term support resource represents something that stimulates some activity. Something helpful, improving, supporting the reaching of some objectives. Main goal of this essay is focused on support resources in software project management. It describes the functions of available resources involved in some chosen fields of software project management.
Author explaines what is the project management in general and describes what has to project manager done to be great manager. Athor focuses also to human resources management and describes the possibilities in using software project management support resources in personnel recruitment, roles and responsibilities distribution, workload monitoring, task management in software project and finally the need of communication and the communication possibilities are discussed.

Abstract:Process of software development consists of several basic parts, like analysis, design and implementation, but we shouldn't forget testing and quality assurance (QA). Testing becomes very important in the process and consumes the main part of system resources and time. These are only few reasons why should we concentrate on software testing management. This essay deals with basics rules of software testing and describes 4CC framework for improving the standard V-model. In the next part we describe realization of testing process in large project team later on, we discuss the possibilities of using described process in a small project team of five or six members.

Abstract:Increasing costs, decreasing productivity and schedule slips are common problems of software projects. Fast pace of technological innovations, economic and other external as well as internal changes put software projects under a high pressure of risks. The presented document deals with a part of risk management in software projects. This process includes risk identification, analysis and planning. Effective risk management methodologies have to protect against cost and time overflow and at the same time they have to protect against quality and reliability decrease. Risk management is becoming a hot spot for research and successive application in software engineering.

Abstract:During the project development process is essential to take care of project progress tracking. Project progress tracking is periodical identification of done and estimating part of project. Progress tracking provides us visibility of project in every state of it's development. Nowadays there are many projects with not precisely prepared plans, in which progress tracking is not easy, even not possible. We experience there is violation of time plan, which is often very optimistic and does not objectively include seriousness of particular project phases. Progress tracking can not eliminate these problems, but can help to identify them and allay negative impacts. This essay opens this theme and introduces some of tools, which may help with project progress tracking.

Abstract:Every person can be put into certain characteristic group according to its behaviour and personality. Companies and faculties look in process of creating software teams at many criteria. One of them is creating team according to temperament and personality of its members.
This paper shows possibility of managing team functions based on personalities of team members. It presumes that personality factor is as important as traditional differentiation factors like gender, study results or former experiences. It tries to discuss this hypothesis with help of existing researches in personality analysis of small team members and discusses the problem of non-heterogeneous teams.

Abstract:The main purpose of this paper is to compare different methods of software development processes regarding to software quality assurance. In the first part the main features of processes like Rational Unified Process ( RUP ), Microsoft Solution Framework ( MSF ) , and Extreme Programming ( XP ) are described. Furthermore, it offers a short overview of recommendations of the ASME-NQA-2a-1990 software quality assurance standard for nuclear applications. It provides a deeper insight to the focus on quality and quality assurance beginning form the early phases of the software lifecycle trough the deployment, technical support and maintenance. It reveals the common features in all these software development processes and it is trying to reveal the advantages of different approaches. This results in a discussion about the possibilities of improving the individual models and also a judgment which criterions lead to consideration, that a particular model is more suitable.

Abstract:Information technology projects are almost always team efforts. Many factors influence the way that teams can successfully accomplish their objectives. One of these influences is the personality of the individual team members. I want to display mutual dependence between personality of the individual team members and team processes and overall success of the team project. In first part i catogorize human personalities into 16 types according to Meyrs-Briggs type indicator. Then i try to decide which personalities are better suited for specifics project tasks such is analysis, design and implementation. In the end of this essay i examine relation between heterogenity of team members personalities and success of the team project.

Abstract:One of major problems software development has to face is risk. Risk, that development fails and will not result in desired output. This failure may have tremendous impact on both economic and human potential even in case of large software houses. Role of analyses and risk planning in software project is to identify risks early enough and subsequently minimize their impact on final quality of software product by planning them. Essay provides brief overview of most common risks. It presents approaches, how do extreme programming and software engineering attempt to handle risks. While comparing stated approaches it focuses on their relevance and usability for small teams similar to those formed within team project at FIIT STU.

Abstract:Software project management is a complicated job, requiring large amount of knowledge and experience. Successful termination of the project is necessarily preceded by controlling time, financial and human resources constraining the project. Keeping balance between these resources and their effective use is task addressed to project managers. Within the scope of theory of project management, different techniques and rules - such as issue tracking or responsibility matrix - have been developed in order to apply some structure to distribution of human resources and improve coordination between specific activities. Complexity of resource control was ground for creating large number of supporting tools that significantly mitigate project managers' tasks. This essay describes project management problem, analyzes motivation for creating supporting tools, their features and explores possibilities for employing them within team project during studying at FIIT STU.

Abstract:When we produce a project plan, we are attempting to foretell the future, what is not so easy. Many projects fail due to poor or bad plan. But not even a good plan guarantee success, mainly because of the uncertainty of software development. Why is it necessary to produce a plan, when many things exists which we can not well predict? The goal of this essay is to inform about importance of the plan for project, identify factors that introduce unpredictability into the project and how to deal with them. Part of the essay is about methods which we should use when we find out that the project diverging from project plan

Abstract:Essay describes about importance of planning in software project managing and contribution of planning in this process. Shows different types of plans but mainly presents project schedule for small teams (max 10 people). Analyzes basic parts of plan (how to divide them), time (how to estimate them), and resources (how to assign people to tasks). Also describes different possibilities how to write down schedule (graphical or text).

Abstract:The support of software quality in a software development process may be regarded under two aspects: first, by providing techniques, which support the development of high quality software and second, by providing techniques, which assure the required quality attributes in existing artifacts. Both approaches have to be combined to achieve effective and successful software engineering. Goal of this essay is to provide introduction to software development process and to interconnect it with software quality assurance and development.

Abstract:Essay is about steps to prevent late project delivery and how to precede exceeding project budget. With monitoring we can at least minimize the loss. Basic methods for monitoring software projects are described in this paper.

Abstract:Software project risk management is an important part of the overall software project management. It has to be performed throughout the entire project lifecycle. This essay offers a complex view on the process of risk analysis and risk planning. It shows why the use of classical analytical methods is inappropriate and theoretically questionable when there is not sufficient amount of relevant information to estimate the probability of a risk and possible losses caused by this risk. This paper also shows some of the basic principles of effective risk analysis and planning methods which are appropriate to use in medium and small sized software projects when the amount of important information to estimate the relevance of a risk event is poor.

Abstract:Software project management covers many tasks. This have made necessary to develop technical support tools for better management of software process. This tools differ from each other. Because the development of project management goes onward very quickly there is still need for new tools which would fulfill the new requirements. This essay gives brief view of types of project management tools and trends in this domain. It thinks about requirements of small team according to use of project management support tools.