Software Project Planning, Monitoring and Management

Course Description: Software project success depends on many factors, but luck shouldn't be one of them. Failures often can be avoided by using planning and monitoring techniques that are tailored to work in a company's culture and fit the size of the effort. This 20-hour course teaches the essential elements for software project success:
  • critical skills and practices that should be used in the planning stage of a software project so that progress can be monitored and adjustments made before the project goes badly off course
  • techniques for understanding the true status of a software development – getting beyond "90% complete"
  • methods for rescuing troubled software developments
  • challenges in outsourced development
Course Objectives: At the conclusion of the course, students should be able to:
  • Select project management components that will be accepted and used
  • Define a project's scope and write a software project plan
  • Create a complete task list or Work Breakdown Structure (WBS) that will form the basis for the work estimates, schedules, and progress monitoring
  • Create realistic estimates of the effort required
  • Build a sensible software project schedule
  • Plan performance testing
  • Manage and monitor development progress
  • Recover an off-track project
  • Manage an outsourced development
Course Topics:
  • Software Development Lifecycle (SDLC) models
  • Software Project Plan contents
  • Vision and Scope statement
  • Statement of Work (SOW)
  • Work Breakdown Structure
  • Project Organization issues
  • Resource Planning
  • Management, Development, and Test Environment Planning
  • Risk Analysis and Management
  • Effort estimates – creating realistic estimates that have engineers' buy-in
  • Project scheduling – creating a sensible project schedule that builds "safety" into the schedule using Critical Chain scheduling techniques
  • Monitoring progress:
    • Tracking the schedule
    • Earned value management
    • Progress metrics
    • Tracking risks
    • Tracking test progress
  • Incremental building and testing
  • Considerations of managing Agile projects
  • Managing maintenance and new development concurrently
  • Performance test planning
  • Topics on outsourcing – how to manage an outsourced project
This course (20283) will be held in Cupertino. Visit the UCSC Extension web site to enroll.