Essay Collection 2010

Abstract:Management is one of the most significant parts of the software creation process. Improper management can lead up to budget overrun, passed deadlines and even the project cancellation. From plenty of different approaches and tools I will focus on the ones which are used for task tracking and allocation of human resources. Project support tool can be compared by their efficiency rates for project workers efficiency and overall project outputs. Is their effect always just efficiency? Along with others I will try to look for the answer. At last but not at least I will compare the managers’ sight with the sight of developers.

Abstract:Many of software projects are late during their development or their development ends with failure. There are many reasons for this. Planning, specifying and organizing tasks have quite big influence these processes. All these activities represent difficult and responsible task. This paper will be focused on problem of planning specified tasks in software projects. There are many known method to do this, e.g. PERT, CPM, Gantt charts etc. Algorithms and simulations using these methods are part of many studies. They provide strong tool for project planning and they can divert from project failure caused by wrong planning. This paper will discuss success of such studies. I will also focus on suitability of these algorithms and simulations for small teams.

Abstract:Software development is undoubtedly a very complex process, which is due to its complexity extremely difficult to ensure the quality of the developed product. Software product quality can be seen in many ways, whether in terms of functionality, usability, performance and reliability. Customer interest is to get over their invested funds, high-quality software in all aspects. This emphasis on the quality of customer is the same regardless of whether their software is procured a large scale and its implementation involved a large development team, but whether it is a smaller project, created by the smaller team. Large teams are generally allocated a certain number of its members, whose role is during the lifetime of the permanent monitoring of the quality of developed product, and thus meet customer expectations for quality. A small team must be from this perspective draw in, but it certainly does not mean that it should be less sure of the quality criteria, quite the contrary. The aim of this essay is to inform the reader about software testing issues in a small team environment and outline the solution, how can even a small team environment to create software products with high quality parameters.

Abstract:Software project development is becoming increasingly difficult process. Many factors may affect work on the project, such as new technologies, increasing pace as well as various internal and external factors. Many software projects fail partially or completely. It is usually because of non-resident schedule, budget overrun or reduced the quality of the final product. For the company it means the loss of finance, reputation, or in worse cases, collapse. It is necessary to adequately address these problems early and prevent them. The main topics of this essay are risk identification and classification. Essay provides an overview to the classification of the most common risks, highlights the importance of the process of identifying risks and at the end also addresses to the university environment.

Abstract:Before the start of any project, there is a plan to develop. The plan which should led to project’s successful completion. The difficult part is to follow such plan. When creating a software product, managers are facing many problems that threaten the successful completion of the product. Even if the product is completed, it often overruns budget, or it is developed after the deadline. Most of these problems could have been avoided if the manager had been able to detect that the development is heading the wrong way in time. But how to find it out? The answer is to monitor the project’s status. Monitoring is a mechanism which evaluates the status of the project, based on the data collected. Then, if necessary, the changes are applied, which should lead to the recovery of the project. However, does the monitoring itself really guaranteeing success?

Abstract:As the development of any software system should be treated separately, so all who participate in it have their unique approach, skills and experience. Every single team member has a designed role, which he chosed and which should highlighthis talents on every occasion. Determining the role is largely intuitive, but is not always the best one. In reality, I have already had many opportunities to gain experiences in teamwork. In each project, demands on team members skills workers were changing, depending on the project development. An interesting example is an agile programming, which is specific for its emphasis on communication and collaboration, in the team and with the customers, therefore showing the traditional role of the programmer in a new direction. This essay compares the different types of personalities and their application in teams using agile development methods.

Abstract:Life is as complicated as we manage it. Most of people complain about complexity of used systems, lots of tasks, wrong planning or other similar pleas. In the real world everything is always about people at last. It is all just about these people who solve tasks together, but mainly communicate together. Individuals that are not able to communicate are sentenced to extinction in this world. Perhaps it is paradox that opposite seems to be true and in addition that it should be easier thanks to mobile technologies, communicators and e-mails, but it is not right. Just because of this fact, means for project management support should be chosen out of consideration to communication and it should not be expected that these supporting means would solve problems instead of us.

Abstract:The communication with customer is important part of good plan. The communication means the assessment of customer’s requirements, formation of information and its export to customers and team. The good plan must contain precisely collected and analyzed requirements from customer. The material and human resources are good organized in precisely constituted plan. Unexpected requirements and overestimate of resources are one of the biggest challenges the managers are dealing with during project leading. I dedicate the issue of effective communication with customer and team and the influence of the plan creation in this essay. The problems of changes or increase the requirements during project and plan modification are connected with this topic. The assessment of available resources is very important. There are methods and conceptions to solve these issues. One of the methods is creating one plan to team and another plan to customer. The second plan has latter delivery date.

Abstract:Nowadays there is amount of programs and software products, but many are not of quality they deserve, or quality required. Often it becomes to quality decreasing beside product developing. Several factors that the development team meets, cause such decreasing. Quality management is there to provide tools to minimize the negative impact of these factors. It helps to apply certified methods and tools used at developing, which guarantee the quality sustainment at the desired level. The essay devote to some significant defects of product in term of quality, which are detected after the product is released, mostly. It seeks for the causes of such problems and thinks of possible solutions as well as it tries to find how it is possible to beat them.

Abstract:Risk management is an important part of software project management and its importance is increasing nowadays, though its actual implementation as an independent phase is still not enforced in quite many projects. Although risk management is not an essential activity, it significantly increases the probability of successful project ending. While in case of large projects risk management is usually applied in some form, for projects run by small teams (of the order less than ten members) there is a tendency to neglect this activity. This essay wants to emphasize that risk management has its place and contributes to successfulness of projects irrespective of their size. Small teams, which do not solve too complex tasks, can undoubtedly react more flexibly than large teams in the occurrence of some complication. Even so, it is appropriate if teams are aware of possible risks and have an idea how would they deal with potential unwanted events already at time of launching and initial planning, possibly even before initiating constituent iterations of the project. The essay also focuses on the influence of chosen methodologies and discusses the impact of experience on the successfulness of the project.

Abstract:It is common knowledge, that while developing software, one of the greatest challenges is to accurately estimate the amount of time required for its creation, testing and distribution. Naturally, software development is a dynamic process, and it is almost impossible to get sufficiently accurate estimation right in the first planning phase. In this essay, I would like to concentrate on monitoring estimated and real time required for software product development. I would like to emphasize the importance of time as a primary resource for developer firms and necessity of its management. I will analyze several methods, which project managers can use for monitoring time spent on individual parts of software and influence of findings on further planning and development of given product.

Abstract:There are many ways how to create a team. Random assigning people to some position, giving a job offer for a post that the company wants to occupy, or creating a group of people who are assigned to different positions then. This essay will be about the last way. Usually, functions in team are allocated on a base of personal interviews and various questionnaires in which employees are valued themselves. It looks over your skills, knowledge and experiences in the area where you work. One of the questionnaires should be used to determine the type of personality. It is very important to know what types of personalities are in the team in team work. There are several ways and approaches how to determine the type of personality. I mention some of them and compare how different approaches may affect the team in its subsequent operation. I will try to choose the best method for determining the type of personality.

Abstract:Managing the software project is complicated and complex activity, which consists of several activitie, that manager must be able to handle. It is for example planning, estimating, human resources management, time management, tracking and monitoring project and making decisions.Today, the software is constantly getting more and more complex and more difficult to manage, so it is imposible to run the project without support tools and metodologies, which makes it easier to see the state of the project and manage it. This essay is concerned about managing the software project itself. It tries to analyze several methods of tracking the software project, like Gantt chart or matrix of responsibilities. Next, this essay tries to answer the question, if it is crucial and useful to use support tools in small projects. Right now I am participaning on one small software project for subject Team project, so I can see the real influence of software support tools in this type of projects.

Abstract:Software development is complex and time-consuming process that requires a very well controlled each of its parts. For the purposes of managing the efficient and successful management of the project is needed especially well-developed plan. Although there are software projects of different nature, so in each group will find a project that is delayed or even completed successfully. How is this possible? Why is this so? And how indeed can be as much as possible to avoid failure? This corresponds exactly to the essay questions. It refers to major errors in planning software projects, and suggests how to avoid them or at least minimized. It also addresses how to create a plan software project that led to a successful end.

Abstract:When talking about software quality most people think that it’s all about careful testing of its functionality. But on the other side, internal quality, quality of design, code and documentation is very often underestimated. The customers would not detect bad internal quality, because it is not an aspect of software which they would be able to see from outside. Software companies can decrease their expenses for creating the first version of software by loosing focus on internal quality. And moreover customer won’t probably change contractor in the future, because competition would need to ask even higher price for future software changes, because undocumented software is more difficult to change for people who hasn’t created it. And more complicated changes in the future also means higher amount of work and higher future sales. In the essay author thinks about theoretical, practical and economical reasons which can lead to low internal quality and what is the impact of low quality on all project stakeholders.

Abstract:Risk management is important part of work of software project manager. With effective risk management one can avoid failure of software project. In this essay I present analysis of influence of surrounding world and relationships in company on risk management. Human factor is closely related with risks in the projects. On the one hand, people are sources of risks, on the other hand it’s people who could minimize risks. I show why it is important to spend time on risks. I describe top ten primary sources of risks in software projects and show how these risks are related to relationships in company and how social environment influences risks in software projects.

Abstract:Monitoring the state and progress of the project is an important part of software project management. Without monitoring, deploying the software to the customer on time and within budget would be only dream of the software team. Since the project manager gets plan of software project progress, his most important task is to track and monitor work of all teams included in project. The goal of this difficult activity is to identify problem as soon as possible in any phase of the project, and intervene to reduce possible damages. In my paper, I am summarizing limitations, that affect relevancy and accuracy of the planning, which is the background for monitoring the project. Next I am focusing on summarizing goals and methods of monitoring process itself, together with identifying the reasons of aroused anomalies and the way of fixing them. In the end I focus on the possible consequences of incorrect interventions to software project progress.

Abstract:There are usually many people and teams involved in the software development project. The team members have to cooperate together and work on the project as a team. They communicate with each other, share information and help each other. Build a team whose members will get on easily is pretty difficult sometimes. Even more difficult might be to find a team leader. When choosing the right team leader it is necessary not to take in consideration his work experience and skills only, but also his character. For determining the type of personality can be used the Myers-Briggs type indicator, which helped me a lot to define people's character. The perfect combination of traits of characters does not exist. Thanks to the researches [1] [5] and my own experience I was able to determine what the team leader's character should be like.