Software Management

Introduction:-The development process is the central process which specifies the tasks to be done in a project. Planning and scheduling the tasks and monitoring their execution fall in the domain of project management process. Hence, there are clearly two major components in a software process—a development process and a project management process corresponding to the two axes. The development process specifies the development and quality assurance activities that need to be performed, whereas the management process specifies how to plan and control these activities so that cost, schedule, quality, and other objectives are met.During the project many products are produced which are typically composed of many items for example, the final source code may be composed of many source files. These items keep evolving as the project proceeds, creating many versions on the way. To ensure that the software being produced uses the correct versions of these items requires suitable processes to control the evolution of these items. As development processes generally do not focus on evolution and changes, to handle them another process called software configuration control process, is often used. The objective of this component process is to primarily deal with managing change, so that the integrity of the products is not violated despite changes. Sometimes, changes in requirements may be handled separately by a requirements change management process.These three constituent processes focus on the projects and the products and can be considered as comprising the product engineering processes, as their main objective is to produce the desired product. If the software process can be viewed as a static entity, then these three component processes will suffice. However, a software process itself is a dynamic entity, as it must change to adapt to our increased understanding about software development and availability of newer technologies and tools. Due to this, a process to manage the software process is needed.The basic objective of the process management process is to improve the software process. By improvement, we mean that the capability of the process to produce quality goods at low cost is improved. For this, the current software process is studied, frequently by studying the projects that have been done using the process. The whole process of understanding the current process, analyzing its properties, determining how to improve, and then affecting the improvement is dealt with by the process management process.These component processes are distinct not only in the type of activities performed in them, but typically also in the people who perform the activities specified by the process. In a typical project, development activities are performed by programmers, designers, testers, etc.; the project management process activities are performed by the project management; configuration control process activities are performed by a group generally called the configuration controller; and the process management process activities are performed by the software engineering process group (SEPG).