Management of Small project development should not be ignored

Small software projects usually involve projects with a workload of 3 to 12 months. In small software development enterprises, such projects are generally self-contained and rarely managed. In such projects, the role of a project manager is often played by the company's boss or department boss. Projects are often characterized by a small amount of investment, a small number of people, a tight schedule, and unclear needs. Because of the lack of scientific and effective management methods for small projects, or it is difficult for enterprises to afford management costs similar to large-scale software development, the development process of such projects may lead to many problems, such as difficult project progress control, many product defects, large maintenance workload, low customer satisfaction, and lack of documentation. According to a query, about 70% of small software development projects have exceeded the expected time, and more than 90% of project costs have exceeded the budget. Therefore, small projects urgently need to introduce appropriate development management. This article provides some effective solutions to the core management issues in the development of small software projects.

I. Requirement Management

The demand stage is the most important stage for any type of software projects, and demand management is the top priority of the entire software project management. Demand management usually involves two major issues: requirement collection analysis and demand change management.

First, for requirement collection and analysis, the core risk comes from unclear requirements. Because the background of customers and software development teams is different, there are naturally differences in understanding the same problem. If these differences cannot be minimized in the initial stage of the demand, it will inevitably lead to increased demand and demand changes. Therefore, in the demand analysis stage, the requirement analysis personnel are required to have rich experience in customer communication. They must spend more time to fully understand the user's objectives and work processes and stand on the customer's standpoint, put yourself into consideration, help users to clarify vague requirements, make simple requirements detailed and perfect, and make chaotic demands logical and organized.

Second, any project cannot afford frequent demand changes and demand increases. Therefore, in addition to refining the demand during the demand collection phase, it is necessary to freeze the demand at the appropriate stage as much as possible. Sales staff in the company tend to accept vague requirements from users and suggest that users "discuss everything well ". This often leads to frequent changes in demand after or after the project is completed, and even causes serious delays in the project and serious overhead of expenditure over budget. Therefore, in the later stage of demand refinement, we must "pull down the face" to reach a consensus with the customer on the Demand freezing and the post-demand increase payment methods.

2. Focus on the flexibility of project design

For small and medium projects, the design flexibility must be concerned during the design process. In actual projects, even if you spend more time in the demand phase, you cannot completely avoid the change of requirements in the development phase. Therefore, it is critical to adopt a flexible design in the architecture design. For project designers, we can refer to the concept of building-based architecture in rationaluniiedprocess to take advantage of the complexity of architecture management based on independent, replaceable, and modular components, improve the Reuse Rate and build an elastic, adaptive, easy-to-understand, and reusable architecture.

Iii. Development Progress Management

The Development Progress Management should focus on the following aspects:

1. task allocation, human resource allocation, and time allocation should be coordinated with the project progress;

2. The task decomposition should be reasonable and parallel as much as possible;

3. The project progress should be controlled as detailed as possible, and the review should be strict during actual implementation;

4. Be fully prepared for the difficult components of the project, such as technical difficulties and time delays from customers;

5. reserve sufficient time for testing, defect correction, and expected demand changes;

Appropriate collaborative progress management tools should also be used if necessary.

4. Development Team Management

For development team management, the division of labor should be clear and the application should be conducted by people. Rationally allocate the workload based on the level. Pay attention to the internal communication structure of the team to avoid "mutual" and "misunderstanding ". Try to make everyone's workload saturated. After the project starts, maintain team stability as much as possible to avoid confusion in collaboration caused by personnel changes.