Software Engineering Management
In software engineering, management activities occur at three levels: organizational and infrastructure management, project management, and measurement program planning and control. This section describes the areas of project management, including initiation and scope definition, project planning, project enactment, review and evaluation, and engineering measurement. These subjects are often regarded as being separate, and indeed they do possess many unique aspects, their close relationship has led to their combined treatment in software engineering as effective management requires a combination of both numbers and experience.
Topics for software engineering management
Initiation and Scope Definition
The focus of this set of activities is on the effective determination of software requirements via various elicitation methods and the assessment of the project's feasibility from a variety of standpoints. Once feasibility has been established, the remaining task within this process is the specification of requirements validation and change procedures.
Determination and Negotiation of Requirements
Software requirement methods for requirements elicitation (for example, observation), analysis (for example, data modeling, use-case modeling), specification, and validation (for example, prototyping) must be selected and applied, taking into account the various stakeholder perspectives. This leads to the determination of project scope, objectives, and constraints. This is always an important activity, as it sets the visible boundaries for the set of tasks being undertaken, and is particularly so where the novelty of the undertaking is high.
Feasibility Analysis
Software engineers must be assured that adequate capability and resources are available in the form of people, expertise, facilities, infrastructure, and support (either internally or externally) to ensure that the project can be successfully completed in a timely and cost-effective manner (using, for example, a requirement-capability matrix). This often requires some "ballpark" estimation of effort and cost based on appropriate methods (for example, expert-informed analogy techniques).
Process for the Review and Revision of Requirements
Given the inevitability of change, it is vital that agreement among stakeholders is reached at this early point as to the means by which scope and requirements are to be reviewed and revised (for example, via agreed change management procedures). This clearly implies that scope and requirements will not be "set in stone" but can and should be revisited at predetermined points as the process unfolds (for example, at design reviews, management reviews). If changes are accepted, then some form of traceability analysis and risk analysis should be used to ascertain the impact of those changes. A managed-change approach should also be useful when it comes time to review the outcome of the project, as the scope and requirements should form the basis for the evaluation of success.