Review By: Gerry Thompson
03/12/2007In Process-Based Software Project Management, F. Alan Goodman provides the reader with an easy-to-follow roadmap for implementing a high-quality and quantifiable software project management (SPM) protocol.

The author's more than twenty years of experience as a contractor for commercial and Department of Defense (DOD) software engineering projects is demonstrated by numerous stories of how many institutions go about the SPM process in an inefficient or disorganized manner. He provides a framework that begins at the project proposal stage and guides the reader from generalized definitions of the SPM environment and key role players to specific implementation at an institutional level of each connected part of his SPM approach.

The subject matter will appeal to specialists in software engineering, software configuration management, software quality assurance, accounting, development, infrastructure support, and measurement personnel.

The author encourages readers to take the guesswork out of the SPM process and follow a model that systematically breaks up a large project into small, interconnected tasks. The author suggests using Internet-standard HTML forms and hyperlinks to represent the SPM structure of a project.

With top-down design techniques and efficient “connecting the dots,” everyone involved in a project—accountants to developers to metrics gatherers—have a central point of reference to drill down to specific sub-tasks or view the progress of a software project.

Process-Based Software Project Management boils down into an informative guide to software project management principles. Goodman covers generating a realistic proposal and implementing the management, accounting, and configuration management environment for successful project management, honed by real-world experience.