Customer Reviews

Quality Software Project Management

5 star:		(2)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

This is, without a doubt, the most comprehensive book available on software project management. I don't make this statement lightly - I have over two dozen books on the subject, and have reviewed a significant portion of them on this site. It isn't the fact that the book consists of 33 chapters and 7 appendices and consumes nearly 1700 pages that makes it comprehensive. What distinguishes this book from the rest are:
(1) A process-oriented approach that is completely consistent with the PMI PMBOK, fully supports requirements for the higher levels of the capability maturity model, and can be adapted to virtually any life cycle model.
(2) It completely covers the important elements of planning, scheduling and control, including work breakdown structure development, associating tasks and deliverables, estimating (the focus is on the constructive cost model), advanced scheduling techniques (including critical chain scheduling that has emerged from the theory of constraints body of knowledge), and earned value project management.
(3) Ties software engineering, system engineering, reliability, SQA and software configuration management to the project process. Many books briefly address these, while this book addresses the requirements, issues and techniques head-on.
(4) Business plan development, requirements analysis, project deliverables and other artifacts are thoroughly covered.
(5) The web site that augments this book has errata, templates and checklists (in HTML format), links and other material that supports using the book as a course text.

There are so many things I like about this book, but the size and depth of content makes it nearly overwhelming. My favorite chapters are 21-Metrics, 26-Continuous Improvement, 28-Post Performance Analysis and 32-Legal Issues. However, these reflect my personal interests. The book is, in my opinion, uniformly excellent. The only flaw I found was the scant attention given to releasing an application or system into production, and no mention of how to tie together issue management to the enhancement and maintenance cycle that initiates once an application is in production. However, to be fair, this book is focused on project management and not software engineering. An outstanding companion to this book would be Successful Software Development by Scott E. Donaldson, Stanley G. Siegel, which provides the same in-depth treatment of software engineering as this book does for project management.

This book's primary strength is in leaving no software management stone unturned. It relates well to established methodologies, standards, definitions, practices, etc. But, at over 1600 pages, it could use some serious editing. Many topics the authors like to dance around in an introductory (and obviously academic) fashion before settling on the chosen path. The style and language often reek of vague, committee-authored fashion, and make for some frankly boring reading. By far its worst crime is its use of illustrations and graphics, which are--generally but almost universally--confusingly drawn, meagerly captioned, and barely elaborated upon in the text. This is a shame, since many of the concepts in management and software can be elucidated wonderfully with quality symbolism and illustrations, yet this book often manages to obfuscate them further.

Overall, this book serves as a thorough and well-researched reference tool, but makes for a lousy textbook.

Such a comprehensive book cannot be wholly used by a practitioner. My interest is on quality. On this subject the book is very practical and can direct all those that are hands-on in a project team. Chapter 30 is very useful for those involved with CMM Level 1 Quality Assurance. That is the start, because from there one can consult others chapters to have a broad view of a project and be prepared to interact with peers.