Quality of Software in Project Management - Research Paper Example

Quality of Software in Project Management Introduction Quality is one of the essential elements of the software development process. Software quality assurance makes sure that the developed software will be effective and reliable. In fact the basic goal of software project management is to develop high quality systems within deadline and specified budget. In addition, the high quality software project management practice is the realistic activity that involves project management resources for each software professional, experienced developers and managers moving into management roles. Moreover, in order to ensure the superior quality software development; software project managers as well as their development groups collectively perform an important role. Furthermore, project team members and their awareness of high quality management practices, organized software improvement, development and maintenance procedures, are able to decide corporate success of or failure. This paper discusses some of the important aspects that are required for managing a project with high quality. This paper discusses the importance of quality for the software in project management along with other issues that can influence the quality of software project management. These aspects can be related to cost, human resource or project requirements. Quality of Software in Project Management At the present, our lives are governed by complex and large size systems with more and more complicated software, as a result the safety, security, and consistency of these systems has turned out to be a main concern. Additionally, as the size and complexity of software in current systems grow, it has more imperfection, which harmfully affects the safety, security, and consistency of the systems. Normally, software is divided into two elements: These elements can be internal and external quality features. External quality features are those parts of a product that face its users, where internal quality features are those that do not interact with the users. However, the quality is conformance to product requirements and should be free. In this scenario, the job of software quality assurance is to ensure that the standards, processes, and procedures are correct for the project as well as are appropriately implemented. In fact, SQA and SQC are processes defined within CMMI, and come under the support process area. However, in CMMI SQA/SQC is defined as process and product quality assurance (SQA, 2011; Sangeetha, SenthilKumar, Arumugam, & Akila, 2010). Basically, the quality assurance is a confusing subject. In fact, software quality cannot be defined for the reason that there is no single absolute and complete definition of its lexicon. However, research shows two methods to accomplish quality software systems. In this scenario, the first method is proactive or process based approach and second is reacting or testing based method. In addition, in the past few years a lot of innovative models and standards have been formed in order to determine the processes and to evaluate the maturity/capability level of a software development firm. Some of the well-known models include CMM, CMMI and ISO15504. Additionally, these models are also acknowledged as software process appraisal or assessment models (Alsultanny & Wohaishi, 2009; Yucalar & Erdogan, 2009). While managing quality in system development, software engineering standards and quality goals are essential however not enough for the requirements of these day's changing market trends. Smaller cycle times, development through a few technology based resources, are as well in demand. In this scenario, the developed products should be cautiously targeted to the exact business and corporate functional needs of more and more refined customers. In addition, the software project managers and developers dealing with these issues and frequently contradictory objectives need to be extremely skilled in coordinating, planning and managing software development projects. To do this, they need to be familiar with how to modify most excellent practices to their present projects and to get the benefit of their business earlier knowledge when constructing project strategy. Moreover, the implementation of the appropriate metrics to check project performance is necessary, while having essentially multi-disciplinary team management abilities. Furthermore, software project management has to examine the project "big picture" similar to it communicates to their career and to their career progression (Futrell, Shafer, & Shafer, 2001). Human Aspects This section discusses the quality of software project management process with respect to human aspects. The most costly item for software development activities and projects is human resource. Therefore a main issue for some project executive is staff assortment. In this scenario, various researches conducted on software engineering efficiency outline the considerable dissimilarities between individual developers. In fact, the presence of the appropriate people on our project group increases the chances of project success. In this scenario, recognizing the technical expertise, qualifications and experience of team members is essential, however uniformly significant is to recognize the diverse working personalities of software team members (Howard, 2001; Royce, 2009). In addition, in software development projects, people work in diverse means dictated by their characters. Also, they build up personal problem solving skills and methods of thinking in a better way about the software development requirements of a task. Additionally, different kinds of issues demand different states of mind. In this scenario, the clandestine of efficiency is to match the project and development requirements with the qualities of project development team members. In view of the fact that there is no “silver bullet” tactic that could be implemented to every kind of project, in the same way there are no wide-ranging system developers. Thus, attributes (skills and personalities) of project development people and staff have to be modified for the project in the same way as techniques, methods and tools are tailored (Howard, 2001; Royce, 2009). Moreover, the widespread pace of work for people could be explained as “soldiering”; operating inside oneself for most of the time with irregular spurts of activity. In this scenario, one of the major challenges for project managers is to deal out people to positions and jobs that reduce the time staff spends working inside them as well as exploit spurts of task. In addition, the most excellent approach to deal with this challenge is to review team members’ development characteristics and make the most excellent use of them within the restrictions of the project (Howard, 2001; Royce, 2009). Cost Resources Aspects This section presents an overview of the cost based resources influence on quality software project management. It is extensively assessed that project failures are the effect of a wide variety of issues and risks inherent in software project condition. Basically, the software development aspects and projects are a set of bigger systems and programs with numerous dependencies and interactions. It engages a formation of something that has in no way been performed previously while the development methods are analogous between other projects. Consequently, software development projects take in a dreary track-record of cost and schedule overruns as well as quality with usability issues (Kwak & Stoddard, 2004; Hughes & Cotterell, 2005). In addition, it is assessed that diverse kinds of issues and risks will influence user satisfactions, budget and system performance. According to several studies more than 25% of all the software projects are stopped totally and the remaining projects undergo from schedule cost overruns, slippage or failure to convene their project objectives. In the course of software development project ‘crunch time’, is the tendency to focus exclusively on short-term aims and objectives at the same time as overlooking long-term issues and risks. These events cause a lot of problems and cost overrun and place the business into a reactive form that is hard to reverse (Kwak & Stoddard, 2004; Hughes & Cotterell, 2005). Moreover, various researches have shown that IT projects have a less effective track record for meeting overall development time and budget goals. Basically, the project cost management comprises the procedures needed to make sure that the project is done inside an accepted budget. In addition, for quality management of software development project we need to keep in mind a number of aspects of the project management and planning. In this scenario one of the main steps we need to take is about the cost estimation, which involves building up an estimate of the project costs of the development resources that would be required to accomplish a project. Moreover, we also need effective cost budgeting, which involves assigning the general cost estimate to development people work items to set up a baseline for assessing project performance. Furthermore, we also need to implement a proper mechanism to cost control that is about controlling the project budget (Royce, 2009; Wideman, 2002). Project Requirements This section discusses the software project management quality with respect to requirements. Project requirements management is one of the most important elements of quality software management. In software project management, the end users and developers need to be acquainted with the duration, length and cost of the project. In other words, it is a procedure of allocating, managing and timing project resources to build up computer software that convenes project requirements (BlogPost, 2011; Hughes & Cotterell, 2005. In addition, project requirements are specified in early project stages. At software development problem definition and identification stage, the decisions are taken for supporting, prioritizing or declining projects. Additionally, in the early phases, system, the project is recognized, described and justified. In problem description, the idea of the project is explained. Moreover, any issue at this stage can lead to serious quality related issues for the entire project lifecycle. So we need to be careful and positive regarding escalation and definition of project requirements at this stage (BlogPost, 2011; Hughes & Cotterell, 2005). Conclusion Quality is one of the essential elements of the software development process. Software quality assurance makes sure that the developed software will be effective and reliable. In fact the basic goal of software project management is to develop high quality systems within deadline and specified budget. This paper has presented an overview of quality relates aspects in the software development process. In this scenario I have assessed that project cost, time and human resources can play a significant role in the quality of a project. This research has presented a comprehensive assessment of some of the important aspects such as how we can develop and ensure software development project quality. These all aspects are a major contributor to project success. References Alsultanny, Y. A., & Wohaishi, A. M. (2009). Essential Characteristics of Software Model that Provide the Software Quality Assurance. International Review on Computers and Software, Volume 4 Issue 5, pp. 577-585. BlogPost. (2011). What is Software Project Management? List the number of tasks it consists. . Retrieved March 25, 2012, from http://productdevelop.blogspot.com/2011/04/what-is-software-project-management.html Futrell, R. T., Shafer, L. I., & Shafer, D. F. (2001). Quality Software Project Management. PTR Upper Saddle River, NJ, USA: Prentice Hall. Howard, A. (2001). Software Engineering Project Management. Communications of the ACM, Volume 44 Issue 5, pp. 23-24. Hughes, B., & Cotterell, M. (2005). Software Project Management . New York: McGraw-Hill Higher Education. Kwak, Y., & Stoddard, J. (2004). Project risk management: lessons learned from software development environment. Technovation, Volume 24 Issue 2004, pp. 915-920. Royce, W. (2009). Software Project Management: A Unified Framework. New Delhi: Dorling Kindersley. Sangeetha, M., SenthilKumar, K. M., Arumugam, C., & Akila, K. (2010). Improved Software Quality Assurance Techniques Using Safe Growth Model. (IJCSE) International Journal on Computer Science and Engineering, Volume 2 Issue 6, pp. 2125-2132. SQA. (2011). SQA in Theory. Retrieved March 24, 2012, from SQA in Theory: http://www.sqa.net/cmmi.html Wideman, R. M. (2002, November). Software Project Risk Management, Success and Training. Retrieved March 22, 2012, from http://www.maxwideman.com/papers/software/software.pdf Yucalar, F., & Erdogan, S. Z. (2009). A Questionnaire Based Method for CMMI Level 2 Maturity Assessment. Journal of Aeronautics and Space Technologies, Volume 4 Issue 2, pp. 39-46. Read More