Essay Collection 2010

Abstract:Support tools for software development should be used for increase affectivity and/or direct support of managing these projects and developing. However too high expects of its additional value could cause many problems for whole project. This appear to be more problematic in environment where it wasn’t implemented and used sufficiently or worst, wasn’t used at all. This essay discuss a simply digest of development support tools. In addition it shows current problems of implementing and usage such tools according to fallacious expects contemplated by some managers and developers. There is also demonstratively showed (by the Gantt diagrams examples) an added value of such supporting development tools for managing project and solving problems founded on analyses.

Abstract:The assembly of a good team and the allocation of tasks to team members is a part of planning in software project. Personalities of team members as much as their experience and skills participate with equal measure on the quality of final product. In most cases, it is not available for managers to assembly team only from people specializing in given problem area, and so they have to use employees, who do not have these skills. Hereby a question appears, whether it is necessary at all cost to search for people, who understand given problem area, or combine experts with people who are able learners, or choose only flexible people to work on the project. The essay is about influence of team members’ skill on the whole team production and the quality of final product derived from it. It also describes the core concepts of distributed software project and the factors, which have to be deliberated and are specific for distributed development. The members of project teams however, have to obtain the basic experience while learning at schools. In these cases, instructors simulate the real world conditions and environment.

Abstract:Nowadays in the world of e-commerce poor performance of Web-based systems can adversely impact the profits of enterprises that rely on these systems. That’s the reason why effective performance testing techniques are inevitable for understanding whether the Web-based system will satisfy performance requirements, when deployed in the real world. The performance of Web-based system depends on many parameters. Each one must be tested under different stress levels. Due to the complexity of web-based systems it’s not possible to use these parameters generally for testing them. It’s necessary to decompose the system into smaller components, which represents various business components and these components will later be tested for some parameters. The workload of system is characterized as a sequence of inter-dependent requests submitted by a single user. Dependencies arise because some user requests depend on the user responses of earlier requests in a session. My approach solves this problem by using an application model, which can be used for studying and modeling the dependencies of the components of system.

Abstract:The concept of risk in software development is probably known to every project manager. What differs from one manager to another is a view with which they are looking at the risk and approach they take towards it. Some managers do not make risk analysis and its management their priority, others focus on these two activities using a variety of supporting software tools. The risk is not eliminated, but its reduction is an important part of the agenda of every prudent project manager, whether treating the risk reduction unconsciously with decades of experience or analytically with careful planning and preparation. In any case the risk is dependent on both technical matters as well as, and often more, on the human factor, which is brought to each project by its team members, from programmers, through analysts to project manager who through his experience and perspective helps all involved team members. This essay’s focus is to highlight the human factor in analyzing and managing risk, and to show that sound judgment of an experienced project manager is sometimes, but not always, more than the long analysis using assistive software for risk management.

Abstract:Development lifecycle of the software project always runs in several phases or iterations. In every step of development it is necessary to manage source files and documents, which are used in this process of development. It is vital to store these files in a way that it is possible to solve collisions, return to the previous version or manage whole process of development. To ease this work, version management systems were used in past two decades. In this essay I present a description of these systems, way of their usage and advantages they bring to developers in their work and communication in team. I also refer to problem situations that could arise while using these systems.

Abstract:A success of a software project depends strongly on the team quality. In order to achieve good results, teams deploy a variety of tools to manage their work on project and methods of personal coordination. However, there is another important aspect of effective teamwork, healthy human relationships. This essay would like to focus on human relationships within a team, from the perspective of various personal types, as characterized by MBTI (Myers-Briggs Type Indicator), what are particular personal types suitable for, wherein lie the risks and what are the potential solutions. Also we deal with the character of team leader. We will look into suitable personal types for this task and how should the leader influence people to motivate them, prevent conflicts within team and skillfully deal with conflicts, if they happen to arise.

Abstract:Propose of this work is how to do a suitable plan, to achieve that the project will be successfully completed on time. First, I am writing about the plan in a complex way, why it is actually good for, why it is so good to create one and use in a project development. The main part of the document is about how to create a plan. I am introducing the individual steps of doing that for mostly a project of bachelor degree type and showing some differences with a team project. I am discussing the whole process of time management and I am explaining what the importance of individual actions is. Please note the most common mistakes when making plans and trying to provide valuable advice to help you to avoid mistakes when making plans. Finally at the end I answer to the question at the title and explain my answer to you. I am also enhancing the benefits of planning in the project.

Abstract:When buying a software product, the customer is mainly concerned about its correctness so that it will help him to perform all tasks he need to be done without any problems. Companies perform software testing before its release so that the maximum possible correctness is achieved. How is it possible that there are always some defects left that emerge only after the product is being used by customers? In this essay, I introduce several possibilities that may often lead to malfunction of whole testing process. It usually happens when the testing phase is neglected or shortened because of approaching deadline, when test cases are prepared at the last possible moment or because of wrong selection of test inputs. Not all problems with test preparation and planning have clear solution so I give only some basic advices that should help to make testing process more effective.

Abstract:In spite of a great number of software development tools, there are still risks to be dealt with in order to successfully finish a project. Nowadays, the field of risk management encapsulates many different procedures for risk identification and mitigation. In this essay we briefly summarize some risk categorizations and relative importance of various risk factors in software development process. We focus on holistic viewpoint that deals with relationships and similarities of risks rather than putting them into discrete categories. We also address the most common problems of risk management linked to human and organizational factors.

Abstract:As there is need for monitoring state and performance of computer network by network administrator, there is also need for monitoring software product by project manager, so he or she can properly design or plan changes in project, that could lead to the project success. In my essay I am describing suitable techniques of monitoring, comparing these techniques and describing some tools for project managers to increase their control over the project. Besides I am discussing about the whole need of monitoring and I am trying to impress my view on the question: how often and in what range is it suitable for manager to monitor the project and which tools should he or she use. Essay is partly profiled to be used as a small guide for the smaller project, just like Team project at school.

Abstract:Everybody is unique and has different manners. These dissimilarities are created by varied characteristics of each person. Knowledge of our characteristics is necessary for estimation of suitability of employers. In a team project it’s same. We can make division of tasks very effectively, when we know weaknesses and strengths of everybody in the team. We can divide all personality types to sixteen groups by Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI). The MBTI is powerful tool to organizing team members to work position.

Abstract:Software project management is a difficult task, even in smaller projects. Success or failure of this project depends on how the manager can solve this task. To help him, there are miscellaneous supporting tools used to monitor the status of tasks, allocation of human resources and other functions related to project management. These tools aren't used only by project managers, but also by the team members. However, incorrect choice of supporting tool may have just the oposite effect. There is now a a large number of support tools and choose the right may not be ease at all. In this essay, the reader learns what support tools are used today, which ones are suitable for smaller projects and whether we need this tools in a small team.

Abstract:Project management plays nowadays an important role in the realization of successful projects. This includes initial planning of the entire project, the division of tasks, monitoring off their fulfilling, possible re-planning and not last the proper utilization of human resources. This whole process of management is largely dependent on the number of people who might be in the plans that the project manager will use to achieve objectives. This essay shows the methods and the need for human resource planning, proper allocation of tasks and balanced use of all team members. The essay will also reflect on how human resource planning helps to limit the resources overload. The essay also offers solutions which can cope with unforeseen overload resources. Finally, the essay focuses on the problems caused by poor planning of human resources, since the problems of this nature, from the project perspective, often lead to insoluble situations.

Abstract:From customer point of view is the quality of software product is directly related to it’s functionality. On the other side, developers perceive quality as complex set of more aspects, for example transparency and effectiveness of the code, because quantity does not automatically guarantee quality. These days there are several methods, models and types of testing, which should lead to decrease in error rates of developed software product and with that also to increase of the quality. Opinions on effectiveness differ, but the importance of testing is these days indubitable. However, testing has it’s own risks. It is needed to know when testing is needed and how and what to test. For this reason, there is a plan, as for developing itself also for testing. The goal of this essay is to provide the reader with more complex view on mentioned problematics, map current situation and outline possible improvements for the future.

Abstract:We can find risk as a kind of problem in every sphere of our lives. Its presence is certainly in the software engineering too and it is impossible to avoid it completely. Responsibility of risk management is identifying, analyzing and managing risks in software projects. These processes imagine a defensive mechanism against the situations, which can be harmful in software development. Their main task is minimizing of possible loss, resulting from risks occurrence. Therefore, the success of the project is dependent on methods, which we can use to sufficiently avoid possible risks and eliminate them. Numbers of developed projects failed due to depreciating of impended risks. In the following lines, we will focus on the basic principles of risk management. We explain the main processes and show the basic categorization. The aim of this essay is dedicated to description of the most commonly appearing risk situations. I will try to give you an answer to a question, why these situations occurred and which are the best methods and tools for their completely elimination.

Abstract:The earned value analysis (EVA) is a project management method for controlling project progress. There are two problems in applying this method on software projects. The first problem is how to consistently express project baselines and to measure technical progress of software projects. The second is due to the conventional Work Breakdown Structure that is prematurely structured around the product cannot reflect the software changes in the development. This essay devotes the problematics and solutions for using earned value analysis on software projects, presents an evolutionary work breakdown structure focusing on the software process elements, and describes the adoption of use case points as software project baselines and performance measurement. An approach to monitoring software project progress with earned value analysis and use case points is presented.

Abstract:Everybody has its ambitions and dreams. Motivation of someone to a job is increasing, if it satisfies its needs. Project manager has the difficult task – to assign tasks in the way, that a work on a collective goal will satisfy needs of every team member. The personality analysis can help a leader to carry out this issue. This essay analyses two well known personality types theories. The first is the most popular method according to Hyppokrates, in which the strong and weak points of personality are known and the second is the method MBTI, in which we can work with research results. This essay is focused on process of assigning tasks in software project and on that, how much are this methods effective in process of building and managing teams. The main goal of this essay is to evaluate critically using of these methods.