Final Project Report
COEN 287­ Software Development Process Management
Winter­2016
Instructor:
Zoltan Kurczveil

Dhara Tamhare
Shilpita Roy
Kevin Hong

Preface

Subject of software development process management provides us infinite knowledge and understanding while witnessing it in at company enables us to perceive how various lesson learned in class are associated at numerous level at work place. Knowledge gained from a book can provide immense amount of conceptual knowledge and spotting it in real­time scenario can be equally astonishing. A through study can be useful to develop instincts to understand how at it is instantly correlated at a company. Keeping this point of view in mind every student of Software development project management class of Santa Clara University undertakes his / her choice of project related to the subject. This initiation enables them to understand this pivotal subject plus preparing them to be competent enough to face all future challenges that will be encountered. Thus as per syllabus Santa Clara University has specially included this project.

Acknowledgement

First, we would like to thank Santa Clara University, which has given us the opportunity to work on this project. We would also like to thank our institute,
School of Engineering
.

Secondly, we would like to express our gratitude to Professor
Zoltan Kurczveil for giving us opportunity to work on this project
.

We are very thankful to Ms. Yue for providing us required information and
Ning
inspiring us to be warm and gentle professional in future. Last but not the least, we are grateful to those who have directly or indirectly helped us to make this project a remarkable experience.

Table of Contents

1. Abstract
2. Summary
3. Introduction
3.1 Purpose
3.2 Scope
3.3Background Studies
4. Insights of the Interview
4.1 Identifying Market
4.2 Branding
4.3 Requirement Gathering
4.4 Process
4.5 Risk Management
4.6 Change Management
4.7 Staffing
4.8 Development
4.9 Quantity and Testing
4.10 Training
4.11 Maintenance
4.12 Documentation
5. Analysis
6. Recommendations
7. Glossary of Terms
8. References
9.Appendix

1. Abstract Software engineering is vastly different from any other form of engineering.
Software is an abstract object and the process of managing the software development projects requires different considerations and constraints. The course encompasses the different aspects of software development processes and their management. For any software solution to be viable in the market, an organization needs the product to be innovative, unique, affordable and quality for the end users. They also need to deliver this product within the schedule and cost budgeted, using the resources available to them. If requirement changes then the quality, cost and schedule previously defined are affected. Any decision making during the product development or maintenance requires the manager to factor in these aspects correctly. Schedule Product Quality Resource (SPQR) balance should be achieved. The project provided us with an opportunity to interact with a professional and try to understand the various features that we studied in real time industry. We tried to understand and draw parallel between the process as we have covered in the academics with the processes that are followed in the industry. We have draw information from the organizations that we have worked with in the past or presently employed with. 2. Summary
For our project study we had a conversation with one of the managers of our fellow team mate. We had prepared a set of questionnaires that covered the different facets of software process management. We asked the managers about the processes that were followed in the company and how important these processes were. The company had already a set market for their products and they are presently not focusing on expanding into other markets. They brand name plays an important role in identifying the market and the products as well as getting them contracts.
The marketing team interacts with the users at various conferences and seminars to get the projects. The project manager looks at the market trend and decides based on the market share that can be taken.

There is a separate team for Requirement gathering and the requirement gathering occurs in various phases. The requirement gathering is mainly done by the product owner and there are various tools(software) which are used to list the requirements.
The designing is done based on these requirement specifications with the collaboration of designing team and solution architect.
The cost estimates are handled by the cost team which the manager couldn’t give us much insight about. But we found out that the cost estimate is done based on the requirement analysis and resource requirement. The development is done based on the design documents that are provided by the product owner(PDO). The development phase takes the maximum time in the product life cycle. There is a lot of emphasis given on the unit testing of the modules that are developed. There are various documents maintained for the coding and there is a repository which is maintained for the coding specifications and module changes.
These document repository acts as the main library used by the Quality analysis and the testing team. These teams also add their test cases and datasets in the same library. These repositories are made available to the maintenance teams which makes it easier to hand over the project for maintenance once it is delivered.
The resource management is the biggest challenge faced. The organization focuses on hiring people who are competent and knowledgeable in the technical domain.
The main emphasis during the hiring process is on the person’s capacity to work in team and to learn new technology on the fly.
Apart from that the challenges faced are delivering projects on time. They try to minimize the time spent on the quality analysis by doing extensive testing. At every phase of the project agile process is used. Prototyping is not officially used but the developer has the liberty to build test codes as prototype to have a proof of concept. 3. Introduction
For any Software development project there can be two outcomes, a team or organization can develop and deliver a quality product within time keeping in bounds of the set budget or they can fail to do so and overrun the time and cost boundaries. The aim of studying software process management as a curriculum course is that we as students learn the basics of process management. To

understand the methodologies and concepts those are required by individual and organization to study a lifecycle of a software product as well as to build and deliver a quality product without incurring losses. The various processes that are involved in the software development can be identifying the market or the user, requirement gathering, cost schedule estimation, designing, development, testing and maintenance. The stakeholders involved with the software development an be the clients, end users, organizational teams as well the environment as whole.
We are making a study of these processes and the role of project manager in the software development process.

3.1 Purpose
The propose of the project as stated above was to draw parallel with the classroom study of the software development processes and the role of a project manager with that in the real industry. This also gave us an opportunity to interview professionals in the industry and gain their personal insights into the various issues faced in the day to day job. As a practitioner of software development we need to have knowledge of the industrial working. We need to understand the methodologies and various aspects of working within a team as well as to manage and deliver as quality product within the time and cost bounds of the organization.
We made a study of the methods that we have covered in the class and discussed some alternatives and their advantages and disadvantage in their organization with the manager. 3.2 Scope
Software development organizations implement process methodologies to ease the process of development. The scope of our study involved study of all these processes and their importance in the lifecycle of the product development. The processes that we focused mainly on were­
1. arket identification or acquiring a project
M

2. ser interaction or marketing
U
3. randing or organizational responsibilities that comes with brand name
B
4. equirement gathering
R
5. esigning
D
6. evelopment and testing
D
7. isk management
R
8. uality analysis
Q
9. eam building and resource handling
T
10. ost and scheduling
C
11. ocumentation at each phase
D

3.3 Background Studies
We started with the study of our course material and referred various books to understand the scope of each software development phase. Also we tried to understand the roles of the people involved in the project. The demarcation between the teams (marketing, requirement analysis, design architects, development teams etc.).
We quizzed the project manager from industry which handles the Retail interaction product software. With the increased adoption of digital channels, retail channels need to evolve in order to provide a greater experience to customers. This, in turn, helps service providers better deliver brand value and promise to their customer.
Retail enhancement projects allow organizations to drive maximum mileage from the revenue opportunity to better engage their customers.[7]
We studied the information available to the public regarding the project.They are building the user interface for the people who provide customer care and services for big organization. For eg. The kind of GUI used by the service centers at the
COMCAST or AT&T.

4. Insights of the interview We had constructed a questionnaire based on our background study for the various aspects of the software development that focused on the processes as mentioned above. The following are the discussions and observations of the interview with the manager.
4.1 Identifying Market:
Identifying market revolves around many things such as what is market trend and who are major players of the market. To identify what is needed by the customer, visiting them is often required.
The marketing team normally conducts survey or meeting with the user to understand their take on the products that are already available on the market and understand the ‘good to have’ features or the issues faced with the current product.
Product manager analyze already existing products and what changes can be made to make them more efficient or what is missing in current product. Product manager tries to find loopholes in the product based on study of product and study of market. Uniqueness plays major role while deciding on factors to make a better product. Thus through postmortem of product provides us insight which will be helpful for the futuristic product. Creativity plays an important role in coming up with new features that can help acquire more of the the market share for the products which are already available.
The organization we talked with presently do not have goals to expand in various fields but to acquire more revenue in the market that they are playing in. 4.2 Branding:
Company which we had identified is well established company and has good brand name. Company’s branding depends on vision of CEO and strategies of the company. As per manger having good brand name plays vital role. She gave us example, if customer opts for start up company for a product then there are chances that, startup may do well but there are also chances that they might close down start up in absence of resources, business or other factors. When it comes to

established company having a very good brand name, customer gets more assurance. Thus, factor of uncertainty is eliminated.
The brand name also helps in acquiring more work in the field where they have established themselves. The manager also told us the brand name also makes it easier to venture into newer markets and expand the organization’s range. 4.3 Requirement gathering: Each product has product owner. Product owner list downs all the high level requirement for the product. Product owner might not have to consider how it will be implemented and detailed specification of the product. These high level requirements are narrowed down in detailed requirements. System analysis provides a bird's eye view of the product to be developed. It becomes difficult to integrate changes if requirements are missed in the later phase of development and impacts the cost, schedule, resource and quality of product.
Functional and nonfunctional constraints are considered.
Normally the Requirement gathering is at every level. For development there is defined tool and process. The development has to follow this process. The example that the manager illustrated was development of Meeting software. The high level design would only cover aspects like setting up group meetings or individual appointment etc. But as we go deeper the specifications will deepen and the software and hardware requirements as well as the features needed are more drawn out. For e.g. Does the user need a notification feature for reminder for a meeting etc. 4.4 Process: Currently, software companies are following agile process. Agile process is dynamic so it accommodates fast needs of software industry. Daily meeting of focus teams is mandatory. In this focus team; QA, PDO, architecture and developer are involved. Feasibility of features is discussed here.
Alignment of work and people takes place in this meeting. Meeting may take up to hour. Through analysis of the situation is done in it. Agile process is quick and it encourage employees to work on proactively. Employees also gets chance to

connect with each other and they also help each other because of better understanding. There are also some cons of agile process. Such as some where quality, documentation and usability takes back seat in agile process. According to her, agile process is best while implementing small features. For big features, breaking them down in small feature may prove better. 4.5 Risk management:
Analyzing risk starts when product is at idea stage. Risk analysis takes places at every stage of product starting from inception to maintenance. Factors which are considered at every phase are different. Risk depends on how complicate it is, unknown factors, availability of resources, sub party and ongoing things. Analysis helps to reduce amount of risk and ways to eliminate them.
She gave us example that in development phase, proof of concept has a risk factor associated with it. Through research is required to overcome this risk. She also gave example when there is API risk then instead of one API, three APIs are utilized but there is no way out in development phase. Any change or risk has to be eliminated, no matter what. 4.6 Change Management: Product owner PDO, has to decide on whether in product we can accommodate any change. For example, any change depends on feasibility of resources and desired features. If this changes are making negative impact on ROI then it is not advisable to accommodate that change. At development phase, up front research followed by Proof of concept is required to curb drastic change at development level. Very few times, due to change product has to be shelved. Often by having different framework or updated operating system makes huge impact to overcome various changes. She mentioned that the decision to include a particular change in the delivery also depends on the importance of the change overall. eg. whether as button is to be included or not.

4.7 Staffing: Human resource is considered huge and highly essential for any company especially in software industry. Having talented people and retaining them is challenging. While hiring new employee their aptitude, potential, willingness to work in team and passion for work is considered. She also emphasized on the fact that employee should have agility to learn, as in software industry technology is dynamic learning it quickly is mandatory.
The interview processes are designed in manner that will test the interviewee’s problem solving capabilities, working in team and conceptual understanding.
For team building various site events and team events are organized. She personally believed in having open conversation, Different people have different motivations. Some employees love to take more challenges while some employees want to spend time with their family.
The manager said that they are always facing a challenge with the resource requirement and they always have to face crunch in the resource pool. Therefore, they try to keep the people in their team happy in their workplace. They encourage them to explore and learn the fields that interest them and also allow them to make transitions in various domains if they show their interest in them. 4.8 Development
The development process takes up the major part of the lifecycle of the product development. The development is broken into smaller modules. Each module is treated as a small feature and proof of concept is needed for each of them. The developers are encouraged to develop small prototypes of their codes and have proof of concepts for them but they are not part of the actual deliverable.
There is a large emphasis given on unit testing and fixing issues in the development phase itself. The manager told us that they aim to catch most of the bugs and issues in the unit testing phase because fixing them later after the quality analysis phase adds to the schedule and cost of the project. Thus to minimize such eventuality proper unit testing and documentations are encouraged.

4.9 Quality and testing
Quality analysis and testing is a separate team which study the specification documents and proof of concepts provided by the PDO and development teams.
These documents are used to build test cases for integration and regression testing.
As stated above the development team tries to minimize the changes or bugs identified in the quality and testing phase, yet the target of the quality analysis and testing team is to do extensive testing and try to identify as many issues as possible with the product.
The test cases, test data sets as well as the findings are documented and shared with the other teams. There are a central workspace for the QAs to upload and document all their test cases and results. 4.10 Training
Training a new joiner and initiating them in the team is a necessary phase in the projects. The hiring process is not limited to experienced individuals. There can be hiring from graduate schools. The new recruit can be trained on the job with guidance of a mentor. The trainee employee is given documents and knowledge transfer sessions with the team members. The recruit is encouraged to ask questions and given small assignments. These assignments can be small features that are later integrated in the project as whole.
In another organization that we talked with stated that they have different method to train the graduate hires. They have dedicated training period which stretches for three months where the graduate hires are given classroom trainings and small group projects. They are instructed about the organization goals, methods and processes.
They said that this helps them to build a large pool of resources and then depending on the performances and interests of the recruits they are allotted to different projects.

4.11 Maintenance
Maintenance team has its own set of engineers. So when any problem occurs they resolve problems. Rarely it comes to developing team from the maintenance phase.
The maintenance team has access to all the documents and specification of all the other teams and they also have separate sessions to learn and train about the product that is delivered. There are Maintenance manuals that are provided to the teams. The findings and good to have features identified by the maintenance teams are also treated as the features that can be developed and added in the next phase of development. 4.12 Documentation: Documentation is highly essential. According to her, though documentation might seem tedious task it plays vital role in development as well as maintenance phase. There are document repositories that are maintained by the organization at each phase of the product development.
If the code is self explanatory and very small, then the documents are sometimes not needed but with major features and development the documentation needs to be expansive and detailed. This helps in training new recruits, can be used by the quality analysis team as well as the development team themselves.
She stated that they sometimes face difficulties due to improper and inadequate document keeping. The organization is geographically spread out and they need to work with various teams in different countries in different time zones.
Therefore, if the documents are not maintained in the repository then this causes a delay in the schedule and adds pressure on the development teams. 5. Analysis
Managing a process involves handling and facilitating communication between various groups of people who are directly or indirectly working towards successful execution of project in highly dynamic environment. According to
Roger Pressman in software development process management; “Project
Management involves the planning, monitoring, and control of the people, process,

and events that occur as software evolves from a preliminary concept to an operational implementation”.
As software engineering is comparatively new discipline than other discipline such as electrical engineering or mechanical engineering so often it requires more efforts to understand it.
“There is no single development either in technology or management which by itself promises even one order­of­magnitude improvement within a decade in productivity, in reliability, in simplicity [5]”. This is exclaimed by Frederick Brooks in his book­ ‘No silver bullets­ essence and accident in Software Engineering’. is considered not rational process as it is
It
highly dynamic in nature moreover software has intangible nature which adds to complexity of it [4].
While analyzing various aspect of project we could identify uniqueness of the field and why it requires special attention by personnels of the field. Company which we studied provided us immense opportunity to learn from on going process. Software engineering is not merely a coding rather it is much more vast mechanism. It can be considered as joint efforts of Senior management, marketing team, engineering team and last but not least customers. If any one of the element in this link is missing then success of project becomes questionable. Aligning interests of all these elements is highly essential in order to achieve desired outcome of the project.
Delivering any project on time is very essential, it is directly associated with customer satisfaction. Especially in highly dynamic environment of software industry it is even more crucial. Company we observed also pays attention to this important aspect. Despite of any change in requirements and various risk associated with it company believes in delivering product on time to esteemed customers. Having right schedule demands for selecting proper process. There are discrete processes for the selection. Waterfall model, spiral model and agile model are the options to select from. Organization which we observed is following agile process. “ philosophy, challenges the norm of developing software projects
Agile
by providing a less rigid, more flexible framework for developing software, where a shippable and deliverable product is achieved quicker through progressing research and development (R&D) iterations. agile process
In
products (or projects) are divided into iterative and time­boxed work units, referred to as sprints , which are typically two weeks long. A repetitive cycle composed of feature planning, user stories estimation, R&D work of developers and QA, and demos and retrospectives

forms an iteration in which a potentially shippable product value can be met and delivered to the customer in minimal time [6]”. For these reasons, company is following agile process but it has some disadvantage as well. We have proposed solution of it in recommendation section.
To ensure that customer is satisfied with the delivered project, good quality is mandatory. A satisfied customer may bring more business for the company. In agile process, company focuses on continuous evaluation of project that is being developed. This process continues even after completion of project in from of maintenance. Maintenance team has its own set of engineers in the team. These engineers are assigned when already deployed project faces any trouble. Rarely, such problems come to team who developed it. We could make inference that company we observed have significant method of ensuring high quality.
All the aspects which have been discussed here may not even have any significance if company faces lack of resources. Especially not having talented and dedicated employees may result into major threat. It is very important to retain existing good employees. Provide them various motivation to work well depending upon their personality. We observed that manager we interviewed has excellent skills of handling and motivating skill. While looking as company as a whole at macro level we have made certain proposal in recommendation section. 6. Recommendations:
After analyzing the data we gained during the interview, we came up some suggestions for the interviewed company that can improve their process.
6.1 Uniformity in process of documentation
The biggest problem we saw in this company is that they do not have a standard documentation process. It is a big company and there are multiple sites worldwide and each region has their own way of documentation which is now causing some trouble. Therefore the first thing we recommend is having unify a documentation process and have a unify format.
6.2 Reduce dependency on third party
We observed that company was facing some hindrance in entire process due to dependency on third party. Hiring or giving contractual work to different company

may appear appealing as it gives edge to company where it is lacking but it may have some limitations as well. Employees of 3rd party may not have same level of dedication as in house employees. Moreover as third party employees have distinct way of performing tasks and different way approaching process, alignment of interest between in­house employees and third party employees becomes challenging. 6.3 More activities for employees organized by Human resource department
Various activities organized by human resource department can play vital role to enhance motivation of employees. These activities may include more frequent team outing, recreational activities, game night, hackathon etcetera. Such employee engagement activities are important when it comes to build team spirit and having close knit between employees. Ultimately it can be very beneficial to company in longer run.
6.4 Reduce dependency on agile process in certain scenario:
Agile process has many benefits such as it is “ rigid, more flexible framework less for developing software. In agile process, shippable and deliverable product is achieved quicker through progressing research and development (R&D) iterations[6]”. On the other hand, agile process has many disadvantages as well. As agile is highly dynamic in nature developers have to be highly active and efficient in their approach, this may result into increased level of stress. Moreover we also observed that documentation and some traits of project at times face hinderance in agile process.
6.5 Adopt new method for unit testing to identify maximum bugs in the development phase: The development team can setup a process where the modules once developed and unit tested by the developer is exchanged with another developer’s module and tested by them. This will provide a new view towards the module and thus lead to more test case scenarios and more regressive testing. This also helps in keeping the entire development team on equal footage regarding all the modules and features.
It also helps in knowledge sharing among the team and reduces the concentration of knowledge to one resource.

7 Glossary of Terms
Market trend: “ trend is the general direction of a market or of the price of an
A
asset. Trends can vary in length from short, to intermediate, to term you long . If can identify a trend, it can be highly profitable, because you will be able to trade with the trend.”
[1]

Agile: “ methodology is an alternative to traditional project management,
Agile
typically used in software development. It helps teams respond to unpredictability through incremental, iterative work cadences, known as sprints. Agile methodologies are an alternative to waterfall, or traditional sequential development.” [2] PDM: Product manager FT : Focus team (Development team, Designing team etc) PDO: Product owner POC: Proof of concept ROI: Return of investment Third party: Giving contract work to other companies or groups. CRM: Customer relationship manager

8. References: [1] http://www.investopedia.com/terms/t/trend.asp [2] agilemethodology.org/ [3]
Software development process management by Roger Pressman
[4]Software development project management: process and support / Dina Berkeley, Robert de
Hoog, Patrick Humphreys.
[5]
No silver bullets­ essence and accident in Software Engineering, by Frederick Brooks
[6]Agile Software Development with HP Agile Manager Liran Tal by:
[7]Retail solution softwares ­ http://www.amdocs.com/products/customer­management/omni­channel/pages/retail­experience.a spx

9. Appendix a. The Questionnaire used for the interview with the Manager­ https://drive.google.com/a/scu.edu/file/d/0ByANwr0VZj_dWW90bzAtM0lW MHM/view?usp=sharing b. The Sample traceability matrix used by the development team in the organization to document the change items. https://drive.google.com/a/scu.edu/file/d/0ByANwr0VZj_dTzljdzRKOTcwNzg
/view?usp=sharing

c. The Sample Support request form used for maintenance ticket https://drive.google.com/a/scu.edu/file/d/0ByANwr0VZj_da28yemhkS2hyaFU/ view?usp=sharing