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Practicum in software project management: an endeavor to effective and pragmatic software project management education

Published: 07 September 2007 Publication History

Abstract

One of the key factors influencing project success or failure is project management. Unfortunately, effective management of software projects is not in practice; what is actually being practiced varies significantly from what is advised in the available literature. In order to improve performance in the field of software project management, there is a dire need to formally educate prospective project managers in both the theoretical and practical aspects of managing software projects. This paper focuses on the formulation and execution of Practicum in Software Project Management, a graduate course that aids students in learning practical aspects of software project management. This course has been a part of the Masters in Software Project Management curriculum at National University of Computer and Emerging Sciences (NUCES), Lahore, Pakistan since 2001. We discuss the course in light of the major software project management activities recommended in literature. A comparison of the course with the Portfolio, Program and Project Management Maturity Model (P3M3) has been done to allow us to 1) assess the maturity of this course in terms of software engineering project management processes, and 2) assist us in identifying and highlighting the areas needing further improvement in terms of teaching, practice and industry needs. The comparison is based on the key process areas applicable to our course and shows that Practicum in Software Project Management is 90% capable at the Repeatable and 81% capable at the Defined levels of the P3M3.

References

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cover image ACM Conferences
ESEC-FSE '07: Proceedings of the the 6th joint meeting of the European software engineering conference and the ACM SIGSOFT symposium on The foundations of software engineering
September 2007
638 pages
ISBN:9781595938114
DOI:10.1145/1287624
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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Publication History

Published: 07 September 2007

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Author Tags

  1. assessment
  2. education
  3. maturity model
  4. software engineering
  5. software project management
  6. training

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Cited By

View all
  • (2019)Experiential Learning of Software Project Management and Software Development via Course CollaborationProceedings of the 50th ACM Technical Symposium on Computer Science Education10.1145/3287324.3287457(160-166)Online publication date: 22-Feb-2019
  • (2016)Evaluating the Collaboration between a Software Project Management Course and a Software Development Course in Terms of Student Learning and Experience2016 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition Proceedings10.18260/p.26760Online publication date: Jun-2016
  • (2015)Toward an Agent-Based Framework for Better Access to Open Data by Using Ontology Mappings and their Underlying SemanticsProceedings of the 2015 IIAI 4th International Congress on Advanced Applied Informatics10.1109/IIAI-AAI.2015.294(623-628)Online publication date: 12-Jul-2015
  • (2011)A Preliminary Empirical Analysis of Mobile Agent-Based P2P File RetrievalComputers,Networks, Systems, and Industrial Engineering 201110.1007/978-3-642-21375-5_12(143-154)Online publication date: 2011
  • (2010)A Mobile Agent Approach for Flexible Peer-to-Peer File RetrievalProceedings of the 2010 IEEE/ACIS 9th International Conference on Computer and Information Science10.1109/ICIS.2010.83(599-604)Online publication date: 18-Aug-2010

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