SEPM Course Reflections

Project management in software development is not only about making sure that the project is not failing. Although it is one of the concerns, project management is also about how to deliver it with quality – how to achieve the best quality possible, as well as to make sure it’s maintainable after it is delivered. It is a wide topic in software development.

Various reasons why a project fails, organisation and planning, and miscalculation of estimations, are several reasons of them. But in my opinion, it’s hard to know what’s going to happen during the development, causing the development to face a situation the team is not ready for. To tackle this, it’s suggested that the project should be data-driven in all of its processes (Crocker, 2021).

By implementing tracking, a project manager will have visibility over the project he is handling. It’ll be easier to make sure that everything is on track. Project managers will also have visibility over unseen risks as they will be able to spot the sign earlier. Interestingly, the tracking applies not only to manhours spent on a task – which usually measures the human capital perspective, but also to cost estimation. By learning from data, a project manager will be able to estimate the cost more accurately based on historical data.

Tools like JIRA by default will track some data and they are having default reporting capabilities to give visibility about a project. Those data can also be exported to Excel, for example, to be analyzed in a more advanced way that’s not supported by JIRA itself. Using them will help the project manager to react quickly and mitigate any problems.

Data can also be used to measure the quality of the software. Guardian, for example, is take the data-driven approach to make sure that their software/product quality. Guardian even said that through a data-driven approach, they will be able to spot whether a bug should be fixed or just discontinue the feature altogether (Painter, 2016).

Another example is when designing the user experience part, UX analytics can be useful to guide us to create a more accurate design. Through an iterative process, UX analysis will help us in listing down all possible improvements and enhancements that when applied will enhance the user experience (Alviri, n.d.).

In my conclusion, there are various frameworks that we can use to properly manage a project. TOGAF is an example framework that we can use, it considers all aspects of the business, operations, people, etc. But in my opinion, it’ll be not that effective if we are not data-driven, all based only on assumptions. Whether it’s quantitative or qualitative data, evidence-based software engineering project management will correctly deliver the best software that will benefit the business as well as the user.

References

Alviri, A., n.d. Enhance User Flow – A Guide to UX Analysis. [Online] Available at: https://www.toptal.com/designers/ux/guide-to-ux-analysis [Accessed 6 September 2022].

Crocker, R., 2021. Empower Your Engineers With a Data-Driven Approach. [Online] Available at: https://newrelic.com/blog/best-practices/data-driven-engineering [Accessed 6 September 2022].

Painter, J. A., 2016. Data-Driven Quality. [Online] Available at: https://www.theguardian.com/info/developer-blog/2016/mar/21/data-driven-quality [Accessed 6 September 2022].