"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 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 stellman-greene.com

Thoroughly reviewed and eagerly anticipated by the agile community, User Stories Applied offers a requirements process that saves time, eliminates rework, and leads directly to better software. The best way to build software that meets users' needs is to begin with "user stories": simple, clear, brief descriptions of functionality that will be valuable to real users. In User Stories Applied, Mike Cohn provides you with a front-to-back blueprint for writing these user stories and weaving them into your development lifecycle. You'll learn what makes a great user story, and what makes a bad one. You'll discover practical ways to gather user stories, even when you can't speak with your users. Then, once you've compiled your user stories, Cohn shows how to organize them, prioritize them, and use them for planning, management, and testing. User role modeling: understanding what users have in common, and where they differ Gathering stories: user interviewing, questionnaires, observation, and workshops Working with managers, trainers, salespeople and other "proxies" Writing user stories for acceptance testing Using stories to prioritize, set schedules, and estimate release costs Includes end-of-chapter practice questions and exercises User Stories Applied will be invaluable to every software developer, tester, analyst, and manager working with any agile method: XP, Scrum... or even your own home-grown approach.

The book is based on the "best practices" of the UT Software Quality Institute Software Project Management certificates program. Quality Software Project Management identifies and teaches 34 essential project management competencies project managers can use to minimize cost, risk, and time-to-market. Covers the entire project lifecycle: planning. initiation, monitoring/control, and closing. Illuminates its techniques with real-world software management case studies. Authors (leading practitioners) address the pillars of any successful software venture: process, project, and people. Endorsed by the Software Quality Institute.

Whether you're starting a software project from scratch, or fixing an ailing one, this handy guide helps you out. It provides essential project management tools, techniques, and practices - all designed to eliminate the frustrating cycle of releases and patches. It supplies you with the information you need to diagnose your team's situation.

Effectively forecast, manage, and control software across the entire project lifecycle Accurately size, estimate, and administer software projects with real-world guidance from an industry expert. Fully updated to cover the latest tools and techniques, Applied Software Measurement, Third Edition details how to deploy a cost-effective and pragmatic analysis strategy. You will learn how to use function points and baselines, implement benchmarks and tracking systems, and perform efficiency tests. Full coverage of the latest regulations, metrics, and standards is included. Measure performance at the requirements, coding, testing, and installation phases Set function points for efficiency, cost, market share, and customer satisfaction Analyze quality and productivity using assessments, benchmarks, and baselines Design and manage project cost, defect, and quality tracking systems Use object-oriented, reusable component, Agile, CMM, and XP methods Assess defect removal efficiency using unit tests and multistage test suites

As requirements engineering continues to be recognized as the key to on-time and on-budget delivery of software and systems projects, many engineering programs have made requirements engineering mandatory in their curriculum. In addition, the wealth of new software tools that have recently emerged is empowering practicing engineers to improve their requirements engineering habits. However, these tools are not easy to use without appropriate training. Filling this need, Requirements Engineering for Software and Systems, Second Edition has been vastly updated and expanded to include about 30 percent new material. In addition to new exercises and updated references in every chapter, this edition updates all chapters with the latest applied research and industry practices. It also presents new material derived from the experiences of professors who have used the text in their classrooms. Improvements to this edition include: An expanded introductory chapter with extensive discussions on requirements analysis, agreement, and consolidation An expanded chapter on requirements engineering for Agile methodologies An expanded chapter on formal methods with new examples An expanded section on requirements traceability An updated and expanded section on requirements engineering tools New exercises including ones suitable for research projects Following in the footsteps of its bestselling predecessor, the text illustrates key ideas associated with requirements engineering using extensive case studies and three common example systems: an airline baggage handling system, a point-of-sale system for a large pet store chain, and a system for a smart home. This edition also includes an example of a wet well pumping system for a wastewater treatment station. With a focus on software-intensive systems, but highly applicable to non-software systems, this text provides a probing and comprehensive review of recent developments in requirements engineering in high integrity systems.

Over the last decade, software product line engineering (SPLE) has emerged as one of the most promising software development paradigms for increasing productivity in IT-related industries. Detailing the various aspects of SPLE implementation in different domains, Applied Software Product Line Engineering documents best practices with regard to syst