Table of Contents
Did you know?
67% of projects fail and coequally waste 11.4% of organizational resources, as a consequence of undervaluing project management.
This clearly marks out project management as an obligation for a successful implementation of a software development process.
So, let us catch on with the ideology of project management in software development that helps elevate business.
What is Involved in Project Management for Software Development?
A successful project is not only the one that gets completed within the designed timeline and specified budget. It should also fetch the expected benefits. Thus, Project Management Institute imparted the concept of the four phases of typical project management to accomplish the derived project.
| Initiation (Planning & Analysis) |
Defining (Designing) |
Developing (Coding & Testing) |
Delivering (Deployment & Maintenance) |
|---|---|---|---|
| Frame project goals Set a budget Set deadlines |
Create blueprint Identify contributors Estimate timelines |
Allocate resources Host brainstorming sessions Coding the software |
Prevent any obstruction Track the full process Handover deliverables |
However, to keep going strong it is necessary that leaders throughout the organizational hierarchies trust and observe this process of project management in software development.
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Methodologies to Manage Software Development Project
A method to manage a software development project is basically a set of principles, tools, and techniques used to ideate, implement, and manage your software development process.
Some of the most popular project management methods are:
1) Waterfall
The waterfall method is one traditional approach and a straightforward method for project management in software development. The phases of a project flow downwards like a waterfall. In a better way, the movement to the other phase is possible only after the previous stage is successfully completed. This approach fits well for highly structured projects with the involvement of high costs to pivot.
2) Agile
The agile method is a dynamic mode of operations to manage a project in software development. Also, it is the most widely used method too. It allows the project to be fast and flexible in comparison to the waterfall method. While implementing the method, project planning, management, and development are all adaptive and of evolving nature, if that improves the project in the desired timeline. Distinctly, the agile development process operates by breaking down projects into smaller portions of user functionality, prioritizing them, and delivering them in 2-4 cycles. This approach is highly preferred for software projects with larger chances of testing before deployment.
3) Hybrid
Quiet-a-few companies sussed that utilizing the ideologies of Agile and Waterfall shows a synergistic effect. Hence, the concept of the Hybrid method originated in project management for software development. It is to be understood that the selection of the phases in this methodology highly depends on the nature of the project. This process is well approached when the project shows the software and hardware requirement.
Key Qualities of a Successful Project Management Strategy
The main motto of any project management strategy is to unite the team to address the challenges faced during the process of software development. The strategy can well describe the needs of any software development and concoct the right objectives for a team to achieve.
Along with the technical requirements for the resources, it is required that highly effective management has the following key qualities:
💡Effective communication
It is rightly said that ‘Good communication is the bridge between confusion and clarity’. Of course, the number of communication channels is overwhelming, yet the thought exchange between resources plays a vital role. A lack of effective communication can cause a toxic effect on the overall process of software development.
As per the statistics, 56% of budgets allocated to projects are at risk only due to poor communication. And the main reasons indicating this failure tend to involve,
☹️ Deficiency of communication policy
☹️ Impassive stakeholder involvement
☹️ Insufficient mutual understanding amongst the team members
☹️ Inefficiency of the project manager to assume that the communication is already done when it’s not
When these major barriers are tamed, the prolific results of effective communication are reflected in the software development process.
💡No micromanagement
Micromanagement is indeed appalling for any development team, in a sensible notion. A project manager might definitely see the positive verge of having greater control and easier work delegation but the team member that suffers, exhibit a very negative impact on the development process. The highly seen negative impacts include,
☹️ Trust vandalization for the team
☹️ Higher deterioration rate in the working efficiency
☹️ Generation of highly dependent staff due to the loss in self-confidence
☹️ Restricted vision and growth of the firm as the team becomes deprived of having an individual foresight
Joe Apfelbaum, accurately said, Micromanage the process, not the people. When a project manager tries to micromanage, he is directly breaking the momentum of any process. Here, sensible communication again can fetch good results.
Source: DesignRush
💡Well-defined project scope
A project scope basically includes figuring out and documenting the list of deliverables in detail, that will be involved in the execution of software development management. This well-defined workflow allows a focused growth of the development process, as it suitably affects the time, cost, quality, resources, and also customer satisfaction.
If the project scope is poorly defined in any software development process, the team faces complications like,
☹️ Not meeting client expectations
☹️ Major changes required during the later phase of software development
☹️ The development process going over budget
☹️ Not meeting deadlines
It is true that the team that does not use any mode of project management tools or techniques is likely to miss the deadlines and eventually spend more fiance on a typical software development project. As a rescue to this sticky wicket, we highly recommend using the software project management tools.
What are the Project Management Tools for Software Development?
- Jira
- Trello
- ClickUp
- Monday.com
- Smartsheet
A project management tool is either software or a technique to contemplate, track, and manage software development tasks. These tools are utilized by the members of the software development team to ensure that the development process is always on track.
It obvs depends on the specific practices of your team, however, conventional project management took always includes features like task management, pitfall identification, task scheduling, analytics & report generation, collaboration, file sharing, accounting, and invoicing.
To make it easy for you to select the right tool, here we come up with a list of some best tools for project management in software development.
1⃣ Jira
Jira is a cloud-subscription based issue tracking tool designed to handle team coordination, particularly supporting agile method of software development. Along with customizable Scrum and Kanban boards, it provides the features like:
- Customized query language (JQL) for issue tracking
- Highly compatible mobile applications
- Reports with different styles to gain the visibility of the situation
- Default permission scheme to enhance security settings
- 800+ add-ons and plugins to control everything about a product
- Issue creation feature gives the freedom to send emails and fill web forms
- Roadmaps to plan large sets of stories across different sprints
2⃣ Trello
Trello is one easy tool that gives you visibility and flexibility to monitor your software development project. As it is built keeping in mind remote work, it is one of the best options to collaborate and stay connected with the team members. Some captivating features it includes are:
- Colourful card colors to discriminate between the tasks
- Advanced checklist to align the team on tasks
- Butler automation for better workflows
- Dark mode to enjoy all times of the day
- Mobile application to keep you notified about the changes
- Power-ups for integration with various apps to extend functionality
- Agile-friendly workflow to track the issues or bugs in the development processs
3⃣ ClickUp
Click-up is one platform that helps you create the perfect structure that extends with your needs. It provides more flexibility to govern everything from small crew to large companies. It is one of those project management tools that will simply your workflow, save time, enhance working efficiency, and improvise your business growth prospective. Here are the useful features to count when working with ClickUp.
- More variations with your dashboard views
- Customization capabilities with automation, templates, integrations, and database accessibility
- Improved cross-departmental and client communication
- Effective real-time reporting that displays workloads, milestones, and goals to achieve
- Better time management wit time-tracking capabilities
- Competitive integration power to streamline your work at one place
4⃣ Monday.com
Monday.com is one of the project management tools designed to have a simple and customizable interface that exceptionally puts people first. Along with software development, it serves its flexibility in sales, marketing, HR, and IT operations domains. Some peculiar features exhibited are,
- Vibrant and easy-to-use interface
- Social media mimicking collaboration tools such as likes, GIFs, @-mentions
- Customizable automation for changing card dependency
- An extensive list of supported integrations to keep you connected
- Real-time data analysis with variegated forms of data-representation
- Friendly online support team is highly responsive to customer feedback with the constant upgrades
- Budget-friendly, as it doesn’t charge extra for separate features
5⃣ Smartsheet
Smartsheet is another collaboration tool that simplifies the management of various software development phases including resources, documents, approvals, feedback, and many more. The basic features that make up the best of the Smartsheet project management tool include,
- Shared sheets for unlimited users to not only view but also edit
- Secured collaboration with all the stakeholders of the software development
- Highlighted changes help to visualize the changes made in an hour, day or week
- Immediate reminders of the important dates of the project
- Regulated privileges of access to the workspace, sheets, or any other such data
- Advanced reports generation for better understanding of data over the sheets
- Access to change history to know who made the changes when
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Wrap-Up
Software project management is evolving, and will continue to evolve with the needs of existing businesses and programmers. If you’re new to the biz world or just making your way into a position of software development, don’t feel like you have to do everything at once, we are here at your rescue.
Ace Infoway has paved its way in software development for over more than two decades. Let us catch on to strike it big!
