Question

Effective software development management focuses on the people and the process. For a software development process to be successful a project manager plays a vital role in making any project a success.

(a) Explain FOUR (4) keys of effective project manager characteristics.

(b) List and explain the FIVE (5) generic phase of software development process.

Answer 1

(a) Explanation about the four keys of effective project manager characteristics:
* He/she should have strong leadership and managerial skills. He/she should be demanding and commanding, and make the whole team, and the team members work to get the job done. He should be able to manage the team, both professionally and personally, and resolve any work or personal conflicts amongst team members. He takes the initiatives in the processes, projects, tasks, assignments, and even jobs. He monitors team members' work, gauges their performance, does meeting, discussions, debates, briefs, huddles, other activities amongst the team members, and creates reports on the work or project.

* He/she should have effective communication skills. He/she should have both, verbal and written communication skills, preferably English and an additional regional language as a bonus. He/she should have email, chat, and phone etiquette.

* Should have a good decision making skills at critical times and delicate situations. He/she should be able to decide on things on his/her own. The decisions should be firm, good, effective, efficient, unbiased, constructive, productive, consistent, and stable, considering all factors.

* He/she should have technical expertise, especially in the technology he/she is working in. He should have generic technologies that are common to different projects, processes, or jobs, and should have project-specific technology, programming, tools, software, etc., prior work experience, exposure, certifications, and skills.

(b) Explanation about the five generic phase of software development process:
* Requirements: It is the phase about requirements analysis leading to software requirements specification. It is first, about the collection of requirements. It is the first stage or phase. Senior team members carry out this phase, gathering different inputs from all the stakeholders and domain experts. A part of the phase includes recognizing the risks. The phase defines the scope of the whole project, the expected and possible issues, opportunities, and the directives that triggered the project. It is about collecting clearly defined, detailed, and precise requirements. It requires analyzing and documenting tasks as well.

* Designing: It is about designing the software. From a broad standpoint, there is High-Level Design (HLD) and Low-Level Design(LLD) design documents developed in the phase. System and software design documents are prepared and per the requirement specification document. It is about defining the overall system architecture.

* Implementation or development: This is the core part of process. It involves, coding, programming, and implementing the design ed software, into an actual software. It is also the phase of building an executable or runnable computer program to obtain the desired specific computing result out of the software. The phase involves, analysis, generating algorithms, and implementing the algorithms in a specific programming language. Tasks are divided into units or modules assigned to various developers. It is the longest phase. Developers use programming tools such as compiler, interpreters, and debugger.

* Testing: The testing stage or phase assesses the software for errors and bugs. The completed software is deployed in a testing environment. A testing team does this. The team tests the entire system's functionality. The phase ensures verifying if the entire application works per the customer's requirements. Quality Analysis (QA) and testing teams find bugs, defects, or errors communicating the same to the developers.

* Maintenance: It is the phase of modifying the delivered software product and after the system has been deployed for correcting and repairing faults, bugs, and issues for improving performance and/or other attributes. The errors, bugs, issues, or faults are experienced by the customers using the system or the software delivered to them. The phase required fixing the detected and identified bugs caused due to exceptional scenarios. The phase also involves upgrading the application or the software to the newer version. Another important task of this phase is also about enhancing the software adding new and improved features.