IS370 Project Management
Hopefully, you have finished reading the accompanying short paper “Improving Collaboration and
Visibility in the Software Development Process”. Table 1 identifies a number of areas that present
challenges for software developers, including a number of non-technical concerns. Management of the
software development life cycle not only requires technical understanding of the subject but also
conceptual thinking.
As you might realise, there is plenty of room for improvement particularly in the management of quality.
For example; it seems that the knowledge that is captured in email discussions or threaded discussions
external to requirements management, defect tracking, and code management systems is easily lost. At
the least, this knowledge remains difficult to locate or in some cases inaccessible to some portion of the
team, even when the team is together in one physical location. The problem grows exponentially as
teams are distributed across multiple sites, time zones, cultures, and even organizations.
Development teams need "one version of the truth" whether it is source code, requirements,
specifications, test plan documentation, or project status information and this information must be
reliably captured if it is to be trusted, shared, and leveraged as the basis for effective decision making.
Questions to answer:

What “quality planning processes” would you consider appropriate to assist improve aspects of
software development in this organisation. Give one concrete example and discuss its
implementation (i.e. management of requirement changes or changes to specification &
design).

Testing, erroneous test data and subsequent results emerges as a typical issue in software
development problems. Define a new “error level classification” that would be suitable for
testing in most software development environments. For example, Critical - Defects that could
(or did) cause disastrous consequences for the system in question i.e.) critical loss of data,
critical loss of system availability, critical loss of security, critical loss of safety, etc. You should be
able to classify at least 5-6 levels.

How would you improve communications within the development team, given that the
environment relies heavily on Agile development practices?