MCA-215
Software Project Management
Running a software project rather than writing it — planning and scheduling, cost estimation, quality and people, risk and procurement.
- Semester
- Semester 3
- Credits
- 3
- Scheme
- 3 lectures a week
- Contact hours
- 40 across four units
- Category
- Core Elective - II
What the paper is
Software Project Management is the paper that assumes the engineering is solved and asks how the project gets delivered anyway. It follows the shape of a project: plan it, schedule it, cost it, staff it, assure its quality, manage its risks, and close it.
It is the most numerical of the management-flavoured papers. Critical path analysis, PERT, COCOMO and earned value management are all computational, and they are all asked as computations — which makes this an easier paper to prepare precisely than its subject matter suggests.
The syllabus also names tooling explicitly: Microsoft Project, ProjectLibre or an open-source equivalent, used for planning activities. That is the lab half, and the tool makes the scheduling material much easier to internalise.
What to concentrate on
- Critical path analysis is the highest-yield topic: given a table of activities and durations, draw the network, compute earliest and latest times, identify the critical path and the float. Practise it until the arithmetic is quick.
- COCOMO — basic and intermediate — and earned value management are the other guaranteed calculations. Learn the COCOMO mode coefficients rather than trying to derive them.
- Risk management is asked qualitatively: identification, quantification, response development and control, with common IT project risks as examples. A prepared list of five realistic risks with responses covers most of it.
Syllabus, unit by unit
Summarised from the approved scheme. Hours are the contact hours the scheme allots, which is a fair guide to where the marks sit.
Unit I · Introduction and project planning
10 hours- Software project management and control, comparative study of different projects, scope of project management
- Project life cycle management, the role of the software project manager, software tools for project management
- Business planning: determining objectives, forecasting demand, proposal writing, requirements analysis
- Legal issues — patent, copyright, liability, warranty; financial planning and budgeting
- Resource allocation, organisational considerations, human factors and usability
- Using project management software to assist planning
Unit II · Scheduling and cost management
10 hours- Time management, the project network diagram, critical path analysis, PERT, Gantt charts, finalising the schedule
- Resource planning and cost metrics
- Cost estimation: expert judgment, estimation by analogy, COCOMO I and COCOMO II, earned value management
- Monitoring and controlling the project budget
Unit III · Quality and human resource management
10 hours- Project quality management: stages, quality planning, assurance and control
- Quality standards, tools and techniques for quality control
- Project human resource management, introduction to CRM
- Issues in project staff acquisition and team development, performance reporting
Unit IV · Risk, procurement and closure
10 hours- Project risk management: importance, common sources of risk in IT projects
- Risk identification, quantification, response development and control
- Project procurement management: planning and procurement phases
- Project progress monitoring, configuration management, software project metrics, execution and closure
How it is examined
- Question 1 is compulsory, covers the whole syllabus, and is made of objective or short-answer questions. It carries 12 marks.
- The rest of the paper is four units matching the four above. Each unit sets two questions and you attempt one, so there are four more answers at 12 marks each.
- Examiners are asked to map every question to a course outcome using Bloom's taxonomy, which is why questions are phrased as “apply”, “analyse” or “evaluate” rather than only “explain”.
The pass mark is 40 out of 100 in every paper.
Learning objectives
- Effective management of software projects
- Tools and techniques used for project management
- Model-based software architectures
- The workflows of the software project management process
Assumed beforehand
- Software engineering concepts
- Academic projects
Paired in the scheme with MCA-265 Lab based on Core Elective II.
Books it is taught from
- TB1Bob Hughes and Mike Cotterell, “Software Project Management”, Tata McGraw-Hill, 6th edition, 2017
- TB2Pankaj Jalote, “Software Project Management in Practice”, Pearson Education, 3rd edition, 2010
- TB3Elaine Marmel, “Microsoft Office Project 2010 Bible”, Wiley, 1st edition, 2010
Notes for MCA-215
Lecture notes, question papers and assignments filed against MCA-215 are in the library. Everything there has been checked by a moderator before it appears, and an account is free — new ones are approved by hand, which is what keeps the shelf clean.