PRACTICUM PLAN

Practicum Plan



Practicum Plan

1. INTRODUCTION

Software project management is a very well-known, yet quite undermined area in the field of software engineering. Evidence based studies in the software industry, reported many a times by renowned practitioners and third part evaluators attribute project management malpractices to quality crisis . These studies indicate that only 20% of large software systems are implemented on time and approximately 2/3rd of those experience cost overruns approaching 100% .Over the past few years, much emphasis has been made on developing state of the art curriculum for teaching project management skills such as project planning, project organization management, work breakdown structures and scheduling, project staffing; project control, managing multiple projects, controlling project scope, project tracking and project close-down.

However, as Reif and Mitri put it, “successful software project management, like programming, is not a skill that students will master from a single course of instruction”. Teaching project management requires teaching students the capability to mutually explore technical skills and 'soft' skills. The dimension of soft skills includes people's management, management ethics, skills, and onthe-job experience.Managing software development is different from managing the construction of a building. It entails not only the requisite knowledge of typical project management activities, but also the expertise in transforming intellectual thought and ideas into concrete technical realm. Managing software projects involves making useof: 1) business domain knowledge (that changes from project to project, unlike construction), 2) technical knowledge that needs tobe refreshed as the tools and technologies evolve, and 3) working with people from diverse backgrounds.

With the new dimension of global software development, the issues in software project management have become more pronounced. Of all the software organizations in the world, 85% are small-scale, with fewer than 50 employees. These organizations contribute to a major portion of the overall software economy, and unfortunately do not have the capability to improve upon their project management capacity and education. They cannot select, support and grow their project managers. Therefore, the people who rise to the level of project management are generally those having development experience but no formal training towards project management skills. Inadequate software project management practices and approaches are thus observed in a large sphere of software industry, leading to failed projects -a dilemma that has-been the crux of project management reports. 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. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee.ESEC/FSE'07, September 3-7, 2007, Caveat near Dubrovnik, Croatia. Copyright 2007 ACM 978-1-59593-812-1/07/0009...$5.00.471In light of aforementioned, it is more important than ever to educate and grow software managers right at the student level, and to teach them how to manage the complexities of real world ...