Software Engineering Management

Introduction

Software Engineering Management can be defined as the application of management activities - planning, coordinating, measuring, monitoring, controlling, and reporting - to ensure that the development and maintenance of software is systematic, disciplined, and quantified.

The software engineering management therefore addresses the management and measurement of software engineering. While measurement is an important aspect of all topics of software engineering, it is here that the topic of measurement programs is presented.

While it is true to say that in one sense it should be possible to manage software engineering in the same way as any other process, there are aspects specific to software products and the software life cycle processes which complicate effective management - just a few of which are as follows:

• The perception of clients is such that there is often a lack of appreciation for the complexity inherent in software engineering, particularly in relation to the impact of changing requirements.
• It is almost inevitable that the software engineering processes themselves will generate the need for new or changed client requirements.
• As a result, software is often built in an iterative process rather than a sequence of closed tasks.
• Software engineering necessarily incorporates aspects of creativity and discipline—maintaining an appropriate balance between the two is often difficult.
• The degree of novelty and complexity of software is often extremely high.
• There is a rapid rate of change in the underlying technology.

With respect to software engineering, management activities occur at three levels: organizational and infrastructure management, project management, and measurement program planning and control.

Aspects of organizational management are important in terms of their impact on software engineering - on policy management, for instance: organizational policies and standards provide the framework in which software engineering is undertaken. These policies may need to be influenced by the requirements of effective software development and maintenance, and a number of software engineering-specific policies may need to be established for effective management of software engineering at an organizational level. For example, policies are usually necessary to establish specific organization-wide processes or procedures for such software engineering tasks as designing, implementing, estimating, tracking, and reporting. Such policies are essential to effective long-term software engineering management, by establishing a consistent basis on which to analyze past performance and implement improvements, for example.

Another important aspect of management is personnel management: policies and procedures for hiring, training, and motivating personnel and mentoring for career development are important not only at the project level but also to the longer-term success of an organization. Software engineering personnel may present unique training or personnel management challenges (for example, maintaining currency in a context where the underlying technology undergoes continuous and rapid change). Communication management is also often mentioned as an overlooked but major aspect of the performance of individuals in a field where precise understanding of user needs and of complex requirements and designs is necessary. Finally, portfolio management, which is the capacity to have an overall vision not only of the set of software under development but also of the software already in use in an organization, is necessary. Furthermore, software reuse is a key factor in maintaining and improving productivity and competitiveness. Effective reuse requires a strategic vision that reflects the unique power and requirements of this technique.

Organizational culture and behavior, and functional enterprise management in terms of procurement, supply chain management, marketing, sales, and distribution, all have an influence, albeit indirectly, on an organization’s software engineering process.

The Software Engineering Management consists of both the software project management process, in its first five subareas, and software engineering measurement in the last subarea. While these two subjects are often regarded as being separate, and indeed they do possess many unique aspects, their close relationship has led to their combined treatment in software engineering. Unfortunately, a common perception of the software industry is that it delivers products late, over budget, and of poor quality and uncertain functionality. Measurement-informed management - an assumed principle of any true engineering discipline - can help to turn this perception around. In essence, management without measurement, qualitative and quantitative, suggests a lack of rigor, and measurement without management suggests a lack of purpose or context. In the same way, however, management and measurement without expert knowledge is equally ineffectual, so we must be careful to avoid over-emphasizing the quantitative aspects of Software Engineering Management (SEM). Effective management requires a combination of both numbers and experience.

The following working definitions are adopted here:

• Management process refers to the activities that are undertaken in order to ensure that the software engineering processes are performed in a manner consistent with the organization’s policies, goals, and standards.
• Measurement refers to the assignment of values and labels to aspects of software engineering (products, processes, and resources) and the models that are derived from them, whether these models are developed using statistical, expert knowledge or other techniques.
• The software engineering project management subareas make extensive use of the software engineering measurement subarea.
• Software Requirements, where some of the activities to be performed during the Initiation and Scope definition phase of the project are described
• Software Configuration Management, as this deals with the identification, control, status accounting, and audit of the software configuration along with software release management and delivery
• Software Engineering Process, because processes and projects are closely related.
• Software Quality, as quality is constantly a goal of management and is an aim of many activities that must be managed.

Source: Hung Vo, https://cnx.org/contents/zx4yYVWR@1.1:zSSxeFKA@1/Software-engineering-management
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.

Topics for software engineering management

As the Software Engineering Management is viewed here as an organizational process which incorporates the notion of process and project management, we have created a breakdown that is both topic-based and life cycle-based. However, the primary basis for the top-level breakdown is the process of managing a software engineering project. There are six major subareas:

• Initiation and scope definition, which deals with the decision to initiate a software engineering project
• Software project planning, which addresses the activities undertaken to prepare for successful software engineering from a management perspective
• Software project enactment, which deals with generally accepted software engineering management activities that occur during software engineering
• Review and evaluation, which deal with assurance that the software is satisfactory
• Closure, which addresses the post-completion activities of a software engineering project
• Software engineering measurement, which deals with the effective development and implementation of measurement programs in software engineering organizations (IEEE12207.0-96)

Initiation and Scope Definition

The focus of this set of activities is on the effective determination of software requirements via various elicitation methods and the assessment of the project's feasibility from a variety of standpoints. Once feasibility has been established, the remaining task within this process is the specification of requirements validation and change procedures.

Software Project Planning

The iterative planning process is informed by the scope and requirements and by the establishment of feasibility. At this point, software life cycle processes are evaluated and the most appropriate (given the nature of the project, its degree of novelty, its functional and technical complexity, its quality requirements, and so on) is selected. Where relevant, the project itself is then planned in the form of a hierarchical decomposition of tasks, the associated deliverables of each task are specified and characterized in terms of quality and other attributes in line with stated requirements, and detailed effort, schedule, and cost estimation is undertaken. Resources are then allocated to tasks so as to optimize personnel productivity (at individual, team, and organizational levels), equipment and materials utilization, and adherence to schedule. Detailed risk management is undertaken and the "risk profile" of the project is discussed among, and accepted by, all relevant stakeholders. Comprehensive software quality management processes are determined as part of the planning process in the form of procedures and responsibilities for software quality assurance, verification and validation, reviews, and audits. As an iterative process, it is vital that the processes and responsibilities for ongoing plan management, review, and revision are also clearly stated and agreed.

Software Project Enactment

The plans are then implemented, and the processes embodied in the plans are enacted. Throughout, there is a focus on adherence to the plans, with an overriding expectation that such adherence will lead to the successful satisfaction of stakeholder requirements and achievement of the project objectives. Fundamental to enactment are the ongoing management activities of measuring, monitoring, controlling, and reporting.

Review and Evaluation

At critical points in the project, overall progress towards achievement of the stated objectives and satisfaction of stakeholder requirements are evaluated. Similarly, assessments of the effectiveness of the overall process to date, the personnel involved, and the tools and methods employed are also undertaken at particular milestones.

Closure

The project reaches closure when all the plans and embodied processes have been enacted and completed. At this stage, the criteria for project success are revisited. Once closure is established, archival, post mortem, and process improvement activities are performed.

Software Engineering Measurement

The importance of measurement and its role in better management practices is widely acknowledged, and so its importance can only increase in the coming years. Effective measurement has become one of the cornerstones of organizational maturity.

Key terms on software measures and measurement methods have been defined in ISO15939 on the basis of the ISO international vocabulary of metrology ISO93. Nevertheless, readers will encounter terminology differences in the literature; for example, the term "metrics" is sometimes used in place of "measures".

This topic follows the international standard ISO/IEC 15939, which describes a process which defines the activities and tasks necessary to implement a software measurement process and includes, as well, a measurement information model.

Establish and Sustain Measurement Commitment

• Accept requirements for measurement. Each measurement endeavor should be guided by organizational objectives and driven by a set of measurement requirements established by the organization and the project. For example, an organizational objective might be "first-to-market with new products". This in turn might engender a requirement that factors contributing to this objective be measured so that projects might be managed to meet this objective.
• Define scope of measurement. The organizational unit to which each measurement requirement is to be applied must be established. This may consist of a functional area, a single project, a single site, or even the whole enterprise. All subsequent measurement tasks related to this requirement should be within the defined scope. In addition, the stakeholders should be identified.
• Commitment of management and staff to measurement. The commitment must be formally established, communicated, and supported by resources (see next item).
• Commit resources for measurement. The organization's commitment to measurement is an essential factor for success, as evidenced by assignment of resources for implementing the measurement process. Assigning resources includes allocation of responsibility for the various tasks of the measurement process (such as user, analyst, and librarian) and providing adequate funding, training, tools, and support to conduct the process in an enduring fashion.

Plan the Measurement Process

• Characterize the organizational unit. The organizational unit provides the context for measurement, so it is important to make this context explicit and to articulate the assumptions that it embodies and the constraints that it imposes. Characterization can be in terms of organizational processes, application domains, technology, and organizational interfaces. An organizational process model is also typically an element of the organizational unit characterization.
• Identify information needs. Information needs are based on the goals, constraints, risks, and problems of the organizational unit. They may be derived from business, organizational, regulatory, and/or product objectives. They must be identified and prioritized. Then, a subset to be addressed must be selected and the results documented, communicated, and reviewed by stakeholders.
• Select measures. Candidate measures must be selected, with clear links to the information needs. Measures must then be selected based on the priorities of the information needs and other criteria such as cost of collection, degree of process disruption during collection, ease of analysis, ease of obtaining accurate, consistent data.
• Define data collection, analysis, and reporting procedures. This encompasses collection procedures and schedules, storage, verification, analysis, reporting, and configuration management of data.
• Define criteria for evaluating the information products. Criteria for evaluation are influenced by the technical and business objectives of the organizational unit. Information products include those associated with the product being produced, as well as those associated with the processes being used to manage and measure the project.
• Review, approve, and provide resources for measurement tasks.
• The measurement plan must be reviewed and approved by the appropriate stakeholders. This includes all data collection procedures, storage, analysis, and reporting procedures; evaluation criteria; schedules; and responsibilities. Criteria for reviewing these artifacts should have been established at the organizational unit level or higher and should be used as the basis for these reviews. Such criteria should take into consideration previous experience, availability of resources, and potential disruptions to projects when changes from current practices are proposed.
• Resources should be made available for implementing the planned and approved measurement tasks. Resource availability may be staged in cases where changes are to be piloted before widespread deployment. Consideration should be paid to the resources necessary for successful deployment of new procedures or measures.
• Acquire and deploy supporting technologies. This includes evaluation of available supporting technologies, selection of the most appropriate technologies, acquisition of those technologies, and deployment of those technologies.

Perform the Measurement Process

• Integrate measurement procedures with relevant processes. The measurement procedures, such as data collection, must be integrated into the processes they are measuring. This may involve changing current processes to accommodate data collection or generation activities. It may also involve analysis of current processes to minimize additional effort and evaluation of the effect on employees to ensure that the measurement procedures will be accepted. Morale issues and other human factors need to be considered. In addition, the measurement procedures must be communicated to those providing the data, training may need to be provided, and support must typically be provided. Data analysis and reporting procedures must typically be integrated into organizational and/or project processes in a similar manner.
• Collect data. The data must be collected, verified, and stored.
• Analyze data and develop information products. Data may be aggregated, transformed, or recoded as part of the analysis process, using a degree of rigor appropriate to the nature of the data and the information needs. The results of this analysis are typically indicators such as graphs, numbers, or other indications that must be interpreted, resulting in initial conclusions to be presented to stakeholders. The results and conclusions must be reviewed, using a process defined by the organization (which may be formal or informal). Data providers and measurement users should participate in reviewing the data to ensure that they are meaningful and accurate, and that they can result in reasonable actions.
• Communicate results. Information products must be documented and communicated to users and stakeholders.

Evaluate Measurement

• Evaluate information products. Evaluate information products against specified evaluation criteria and determine strengths and weaknesses of the information products. This may be performed by an internal process or an external audit and should include feedback from measurement users. Record lessons learned in an appropriate database.
• Evaluate the measurement process. Evaluate the measurement process against specified evaluation criteria and determine the strengths and weaknesses of the process. This may be performed by an internal process or an external audit and should include feedback from measurement users.
• Identify potential improvements. Such improvements may be changes in the format of indicators, changes in units measured, or reclassification of categories. Determine the costs and benefits of potential improvements and select appropriate improvement actions. Communicate proposed improvements to the measurement process owner and stakeholders for review and approval. Also communicate lack of potential improvements if the analysis fails to identify improvements.