LARGE SOFTWARE PROJECTS Risking Life and Limb By Ansar Muhammad

129 Pages·2010·0.33 MB·English

by  Ansar Muhammad

LARGE SOFTWARE PROJECTS
Risking Life and Limb
By
Ansar Muhammad
&
Rahim Hasnani
(Contributing Author)
Book website: www.largesoftwareprojects.com
Large Software Projects
This work is released under the Creative
Commons License by Ansar Muhammad and
Rahim Hasnani
You are free
to Share – to copy, distribute, display, and
perform the work
to Remix – to make derivative works
Under the following conditions
Attribution. You must attribute the work in the
manner specified by the author or licensor (but
not in any way that suggests that they endorse
you or your use of the work).
Noncommercial. You may not use this work for
commercial purposes.
Share Alike. If you alter, transform, or build
upon this work, you may distribute the resulting
work only under the same or similar license to
this one.
- For any reuse or distribution, you must
make clear to others the license terms of
this work
- Any of the above conditions can be waived
if you get permission from the copyright
holders
- Apart from the remix rights granted under
this license, nothing in this license impairs
or restricts the author’s moral rights
The full license can be accessed at
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/us/legalcode
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CONTENTS
Acknowledgement 6
Who Should Read This Book? 7
Introduction 8
Part 1 – The Story 10
So It Begins 11
All that Glitters 14
Trouble 15
The Inner Voice 18
Experience 20
Knowing What You Want 22
Think Before You Leap 25
Divide And Conquer 28
Do They Like It Too 33
The Big Day 34
Bull’s Eye 37
There Is Method To This Madness 39
The True Test 43
Need Some Lady Luck 46
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Is Everyone On The Same Page 48
The Sum Of All Fears 52
What’s All The Excitement About
Use Cases? 54
Sharing The Plan 57
Having Fun 58
The First PMT Meeting 63
The First Release 65
Minha Delivers On The Promise 66
The Customer Gets The First
Exposure 68
Eihaab To The Rescue 71
Motivation 73
Planning The Transition 76
Managing Change 78
Train, Train and Train Some More 81
Both Projects Come To An End 84
Part 2 – Lesson’s Learned 88
Part 3 – What You Should Avoid 106
Management 108
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Technical 119
Concluding Thoughts 127
Reviews 128
Authors 129
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ACKNOWLEDGEMENT
No book can be written without unrelenting
support from close family and friends. This
book is no different in this regard. We thank
them for being part of our lives and standing
behind us in our endeavours.
Special thanks go to our friends who proof read
the script and made innumerable valuable
suggestions.
We thank our parents without whose devotion
and love we would not have been able to write a
single word, leave alone a book.
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WHO SHOULD READ THIS BOOK
This book primarily has been written for new
project managers who are just starting out with
large software projects.
We hope that this book will also help anyone
who is involved in the development or
implementation / deployment of large software
projects. They can belong to the technical
community or to the large community of users /
sponsors / stakeholders who receive and use the
ultimate end products / software.
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INTRODUCTION
This book tries to explain some of the key
concepts of managing large software
development projects in the form of a story.
The idea is borrowed from Patrick Lencioni,
whose books like “Death by Meeting” and “The
Five Dysfunctions of a Team” have shown that
it is better to teach through examples and
stories than to give theory and more theory.
The lessons learned through this approach tend
to stick in the reader’s mind long afterwards.
We have tried not to cram too much information
in this book; instead we have taken a few
themes that we want to talk about and focused
on those only. Some of the themes discussed in
this book are dividing a project to manage it
better, managing scope creep, managing
productive teams, writing good requirement
specifications, etc.
We have divided the book into three parts. The
first part “The Story” covers a story which gives
the reader an understanding of the issues
involved in managing large software
development projects. The second part
“Lessons Learned” explains the thoughts
expressed in each chapter to highlight the
message and theme behind the conversation.
The third part “What you should avoid?” tries to
list most of the mistakes that you should try to
avoid while planning and executing large
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software projects. This list is a work in
progress.
There are many good books from Steve
McConnell and other authors who have written
on software development methodologies and
software project management practices and we
would encourage our readers to read these books
as well. Life is just too short to learn from our
own mistakes!
You should be able to read this book in a few
hours and that is exactly the idea; to keep it
short and simple. We have tried to make the
book interesting so that you can read it as your
bedtime story book!
This book is part of a series that is planned to
be written so that our readers get good exposure
to most of the key concepts related to the topic
at hand.
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PART 1
THE STORY

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