Show Me! Microsoft Office Project 2003
Author: Brian Kennemer
Show Me Microsoft Office Project 2003 covers all the most important Project tasks using clear, step-by-step instructions, and is illustrated with hundreds of helpful screenshots. This easy-to-use book includes Show Me Live! Software that shows you how to perform everyday tasks and helps you gain real-world project experience. Other features include PM Focus, a full sidebar page with project management related information explaining when and why you might use a particular Project function.
The book is perfect for the advanced beginner to intermediate user who has limited experience with Project and who wants to learn through a highly visual, less text extensive approach. Because it is a task-based reference, it is also great for previous version users who want to quickly get up to speed on a new version.
Interesting book: Overcome Neck and Back Pain or Ancient Wisdom of the Chinese Tonic Herbs
Software Project Management: A Unified Framework
Author: Walker Royc
Software Project Management presents a new management framework uniquely suited to the complexities of modern software development. Walker Royce's pragmatic perspective exposes the shortcomings of many well-accepted management priorities and equips software professionals with state-of-the-art knowledge derived from his twenty years of successful from-the-trenches project management experience.
This book provides a clear and provocative discussion of the economics, metrics, and management strategies needed to plan and execute a software project successfully. Royce discusses-with refreshing candor-some of the fads, follies, and excesses of the software industry, clearly differentiating proven techniques from obsolete methods. Paired with this insightful examination are compelling arguments for new management approaches that are sure to stimulate debate. The relative impacts of these new techniques are quantified through simple economic analyses, common sense, and anecdotal evidence. The resulting framework strikes a pragmatic balance between theory and practice that can be readily applied in today's challenging development environment. An extensive case study of a large-scale, million-line project-deployed successfully on schedule and under budget using these techniques-further illustrates their application.
Software Project Management provides the software industry with field-proven benchmarks for making tactical decisions and strategic choices that will enhance an organization's probability of success.
This book includes:
- Top ten principles for modern software management
- Strategies for smoothly transitioning an organization to modern processes and technologies (such as Rational's Unified process)
- Methods for keeping software engineering teams motivated and effectively prioritized
- Insight into how technology, people, and economics impact project management.
- Metrics and forecasting guidance for project costs, schedules, and quality control
From the backcover.
Dr. Dobb's Electronic Review of Computer Books - Gregory V. Wilson
Dancing Around the Problem
If you're like me, you had to wade through at least one dry, and apparently irrelevant, software engineering text at college. Well, guess what? You'll probably have to do it again a couple of years from now. If you do, you might want to check out the books reviewed below.
Every software developer I know believes that the Year 2000 bug is going to cause some degree of chaos. The debate tends to focus on how much, but I'm more interested in what will happen to our profession afterward. With millions of voters screaming about missing social security checks and driver's licenses that can't be renewed, politicians will want quick, tidy solutions.
I therefore predict that within a year or two there will be new laws in most jurisdictions requiring programmers to demonstrate that they meet certain professional standards in order to bid on large government contracts. And where will those standards come from? My best guess is that the top practices of the time, or at least practices with large advocacy groups, will be adopted wholesale. It really won't matter whether UML (for example) is the "right" notation for object-oriented design. It will be in the right place, at the right time, and we will all have to choose between using it, or letting big (and profitable) contracts pass us by.
All of which brings me to the first of this review's two books. Kim Caputo started on the Burroughs side of Unisys, which typically used many small teams to develop software. There was little process, and teams succeeded or failed based almost entirely on the strengths or weaknesses of their members. In contrast, the Sperry side of Unisys had lots of process documentation, but as the merged company's business changed, that documentation was becoming shelfware.
Walker Royce's Software Project Management, on the other hand, is a more traditional, but also somewhat iconoclastic, book. The introduction to Part I is a good indicator of Royce's approach:
"In the past 10 years, I have participated in the software process improvement efforts of several Fortune 500 companies. Typical goals of these efforts are to achieve a 2X, 3X, or 10X increase in productivity, qualtiy, time to market, or…all three…The funny thing is that many of these organizations have no idea what X is, in objective terms."
Royce's thesis is that many current software management practices are tied to archaic technologies and techniques. His book therefore focuses on what we should keep doing, what we should change, and why. For example, Chapter 4 is a point-by-point discussion of the points raised in Alan Davis's influential article "Fifteen Principles of Software Engineering." Royce argues that some of Davis's principles, such as evaluating design alternatives before starting construction, are anchored in the discredited waterfall model, and may actually be counter-productive in a world where iterative development is done using commodity components.
Similarly, Royce is sceptical about the benefits of code inspections, believing both that modern tools allow automated testing through the project lifecycle, and that code inspections are usually so boring that they are inevitably superficial. Perhaps his most challenging statement is that you shouldn't plan to throw this process away. Instead, you should plan to evolve your product.
Unfortunately, some of the middle chapters are bogged down with descriptions of management sets, requirements sets, and so on. These chapters discuss how the various bits and pieces of managementaria relate to one another, without actually describing what they are. For someone like me, who has never worked on a 100-person, multiyear project, it's all a bit opaque.
Despite that, I think Royce's book is worth reading, primarily because it challenges received wisdom. I came away feeling that he had tried many things, and had thought long and hard about why some approaches worked and some didn't. I believe we're all going to have to do that in about a year's time, and I recommend this book to anyone who wants to get an early start.
Table of Contents:
| List of Figures | ||
| List of Tables | ||
| Foreword | ||
| Preface | ||
| Pt. I | Software Management Renaissance | 1 |
| Ch. 1 | Conventional Software Management | 5 |
| Ch. 2 | Evolution of Software Economics | 21 |
| Ch. 3 | Improving Software Economics | 31 |
| Ch. 4 | The Old Way and the New | 55 |
| Pt. II | A Software Management Process Framework | 69 |
| Ch. 5 | Life-Cycle Phases | 73 |
| Ch. 6 | Artifacts of the Process | 83 |
| Ch. 7 | Model-Based Software Architectures | 109 |
| Ch. 8 | Workflows of the Process | 117 |
| Ch. 9 | Checkpoints of the Process | 125 |
| Pt. III | Software Management Disciplines | 135 |
| Ch. 10 | Iterative Process Planning | 139 |
| Ch. 11 | Project Organizations and Responsibilities | 155 |
| Ch. 12 | Process Automation | 167 |
| Ch. 13 | Project Control and Process Instrumentation | 187 |
| Ch. 14 | Tailoring the Process | 209 |
| Pt. IV | Looking Forward | 221 |
| Ch. 15 | Modern Project Profiles | 225 |
| Ch. 16 | Next-Generation Software Economics | 237 |
| Ch. 17 | Modern Process Transitions | 247 |
| Pt. V | Case Studies and Backup Material | 255 |
| App. A | The State of the Practice in Software Management | 259 |
| App. B | The COCOMO Cost Estimation Model | 265 |
| App. C | Change Metrics | 283 |
| App. D | CCPDS-R Case Study | 299 |
| App. E | Process Improvement and Mapping to the CMM | 363 |
| Glossary | 391 | |
| References | 397 | |
| Index | 401 |
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