Software Development: Key Elements for Success
Staff
The need for personnel for the development of highly trained and motivated software has been with us for a long time. In fact, the “human factor” is so important that the Software Engineering Institute has developed a maturity model capability personnel management “to increase software development organizations to carry out increasingly complex applications by helping to attract, grow, motivate, deploy and retain talent to improve their software development capability”.
Product
Before you can plan a project, you should set the objectives and scope of the product. You should consider alternative solutions and identify technical and management difficulties. Without this information, it is impossible to define reasonable and accurate estimates of the cost, an effective risk assessment, a realistic breakdown of the tasks of the project, or an affordable project plan to provide a reliable indication of progress.
Process
A software process provides the structure from which you can set a detailed plan for software development.
Project
We manage software projects planned and controlled for one main reason. And yet, we are still struggling. Although the success rate for software projects has improved somewhat, our project failure rate remains higher than it should be.
Personnel
In this section, we examine the participants involved in the process of software and how they organize to perform effective software engineering.
- Managers (above), who define the business issues that often have a significant influence on the project.
- Managers (technical project), who must plan, motivate, organize, and control professionals’ work to analyze software.
- Professionals, who provide the technical skills required for the engineering of a product or application.
- Clients, who specify the requirements for the engineering of software or other items that have less influence on the outcome.
- End-users, who interact with the software once it has been delivered for production.
Team Leaders
Managing a project is an intensely human activity, and for this reason, competent software professionals are often not good team leaders. They just do not have the right mix of individual capabilities.
- Motivation: ability to motivate staff to produce according to their best abilities.
- Organization: ability to mold existing processes or invent new ones that allow the initial concept to be transformed into a final product.
- Ideas and innovation: the ability to motivate staff to create and feel creative, even when they have to work within the limits for a product or a particular software application.
Problem Resolution: An efficient manager of a software project can diagnose technical and organizational aspects most relevant to structure a systematic resolution or properly motivate other professionals to develop the solution, applying the lessons learned from past projects to new situations, staying flexible enough to change management if initial attempts to solve the problem do not work.