Applied Software Project Management
By Andrew Stellman, Jennifer Greene
November 2005
Pages: 322
Series: Theory In Practice
ISBN 10: 0-596-00948-8 |
ISBN 13: 9780596009489
(5) (Average of 1 Customer Reviews)
What makes software projects succeed? It takes more than a good idea and a team of talented programmers. Applied Software Project Management provides you with tools, techniques, and practices that you can use on your own projects right away. It supplies you with the information you need to diagnose your team's situation and presents practical advice to help you build better software.
Full Description
What makes software projects succeed? It takes more than a good idea and a team of talented programmers. A project manager needs to know how to guide the team through the entire software project. There are common pitfalls that plague all software projects and rookie mistakes that are made repeatedly--sometimes by the same people! Avoiding these pitfalls is not hard, but it is not necessarily intuitive. Luckily, there are tried and true techniques that can help any project manager.
In Applied Software Project Management, Andrew Stellman and Jennifer Greene provide you with tools, techniques, and practices that you can use on your own projects right away. This book supplies you with the information you need to diagnose your team's situation and presents practical advice to help you achieve your goal of building better software.
Topics include:
- Planning a software project
- Helping a team estimate its workload
- Building a schedule
- Gathering software requirements and creating use cases
- Improving programming with refactoring, unit testing, and version control
- Managing an outsourced project
- Testing software
Jennifer Greene and Andrew Stellman have been building software together since 1998. Andrew comes from a programming background and has managed teams of requirements analysts, designers, and developers. Jennifer has a testing background and has managed teams of architects, developers, and testers. She has led multiple large-scale outsourced projects. Between the two of them, they have managed every aspect of software development. They have worked in a wide range of industries, including finance, telecommunications, media, nonprofit, entertainment, natural-language processing, science, and academia. For more information about them and this book, visit http://www.stellman-greene.com.
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Book details
First Edition: November 2005
Series:
ISBN: 0-596-00948-8
Pages: 322
Average Customer Reviews: (5) (Based on 1 Reviews)
Featured customer reviews
This is a guide or handbook, September 03 2007
Applied Software Project Management
Reviewed by Steven D. Sewell, PMP
Project Management Institute, Tampa Bay Chapter
Having been peripherally involved as a software release project team member in the past, I knew enough to get my piece of the puzzle delivered. The information in this book allows me to broaden my perspective and actually comprehend the picture I see on the puzzle box cover. The book is written in a straight ahead manner. If you are one who like examples of what is being discussed, then this book is for you. The use of clear definitions makes each topic understandable and the analogies make them memorable. Tables and scripts are used throughout to exemplify each tool and technique. Most useful in practice are the sections that aid in the diagnosing of problems that can be encountered. This book definitely hits its goal of delivering a practical guide into the hands of a software project manager. The only improvement would be to have “handbook” or “guide” placed somewhere on the cover.
Media reviews
"Reading the book, I was consistently impressed by how well the authors identified almost all of the problems I've noticed (as well as a number of problems I haven't), explored why they occur, and provided straightforward solutions to those problems. I've sometimes seen things go wrong, but not really known how to fix them; this book's helped me understand what's happened and how to help things go right in the future...I wish I'd read this book ten years ago...I can't recommend it strongly enough; if you manage software projects, and you get the sense that things could maybe go better, read this book. "
-- Rob Earhart, Amazon.com
"Applied Software Project Management is one of the better books I have read from O'Reilly. At no point was I bogged down in technical concepts I couldn't understand. It was actually quite difficult to put down until I finished whatever section I was reading at any given time. I recommend this book to anyone involved in software project management."
-- Sean Smith, Dalhousie ACM
"This has to be on every single programmer's bookshelf and should be a mandatory item upon joining a company. It covers a lot of things that I for one wish the web industry would adopt in a more proactive manner."
-- Scott Barnes, MossyBlog.com
"I was very pleased with this book. I thought it was a realistic and well-thought out book on software project management. This book goes a long way toward arming someone with the tools they need to effectively manage a software development project."
-- Mike George, Amazon.com
"Applied Software Project Management provides software engineers with a handy guide to what makes software projects succeed...is broad enough to apply to all kinds of projects, yet specific enough to provide solid solutions."
-- Diane Donovan, Library Bookwatch
"I've tried many project management processes and have searched through most of the popular literature over the years trying to find the best way to implement real process change. Much of the literature describes the processes well but ignores the implementation entirely. Applied Software Project Management does a wonderful job both describing the various tools and techniques and giving detailed instructions on how to implement them. The book even goes so far as to describing how to implement processes in an organization that is openly hostile to change and/or process in general."
--O. Fishel, Amazon.com review, December 2005
"Applied Software Project Management is one of the better books I have read from O’Reilly. At no point was I bogged down in technical concepts I couldn’t understand. It was actually quite difficult to put down until I finished whatever section I was reading at any given time. I recommend this book to anyone involved in software project management."
--Sean Smith, Crazy or Genius?, January 2006
"If you're looking for solid, easy to follow advice on estimation, requirements gathering, managing change and more, you can stop now: this is the book for you."
--Scott Berkun, Author of The Art of Project Management
“The challenges in effectively managing software development projects are well known. Books on software project management tend to focus on the tools and techniques for managing projects. There are two problems with this: 1) not every project needs to use every technique, but it is not clear which techniques to use for particular projects; and 2) projects are frequently derailed by social and organizational concerns, not technical problems. Applied Software Project Management by Stellman and Greene offers a fresh perspective by providing practical advice to project leaders on project management. It offers a way for project managers to select the specific techniques that will benefit a particular project.
"This book provides practical advice on how to convince stakeholders that quality activities are worth the investment, how to determine what are the most important quality practices to implement, given limited time and budget, and how to work with others and motivate them to improve the development process.”
--Sandra Slaughter, Professor, Tepper School of Business, Carnegie Mellon University
“The stepping-stone for missed expectations is set when the decision to fund a project is based on investment assumptions that are not shared with the project manager. Shareholder value is equally undermined when business leaders cannot easily determine the true status of their projects. Stellman and Greene open the door to greater profitability by making the case for top-down and bottom-up transparency, from project conception through closeout. Read this book for some practical guidance you can start applying right away.”
--Richard Toledo, Executive Director/Eastern U.S. For Program Planning Professionals, Inc., also known as PCubed
“Whether your software team is centrally located or geographically distributed, Applied Software Project Management provides practical advice on how to effectively manage the efforts of your team.”
--Sanjay Podder, PMP, CSQA, Accenture IDC -- Avanade AG, Avanade Mumbai Center Lead
“To be honest, I wanted to write this book. There are a fair number of books that discuss project management from a philosophical or theoretical point of view, but few that address it in real, practical terms. Applied Software Project Management does just that and does it well. Stellman and Greene walk through the aspects of software development, including defining a project vision, choosing a development process, configuration management, requirements tracking, and testing, with real examples and discussions of tools used in the wild. I’ve chosen this book for my graduate software engineering class and will make it part of any client project. It’s honest, practical, and full of real experience.”
--Dan Pilone, Senior Software Architect with Blueprint Technologies and Lecturer at the Catholic University of America in Washington, D.C.
