Professional Skills

1
Professional Skills

• Introduction to CO2403
• Chris Casey

2
What are professional skills?

• Project Management Skills
• Planning, monitoring, control
• Ensuring quality
• Awareness of legal ethical issues
• Teamwork Skills
• Academic Skills
• Finding using academic material

3
Module Structure

• Semester 1
• Lectures, tutorials, practicals
• Project Management Theory
• Common to all courses
• Semester 2
• Team-based course-specific project
• Use theory
• Practise for final year project

4
Assessment

• Examination 40
• Question 1 based on assignment 2
• Choice of questions on theory
• Based on case study
• Coursework 60
• Assignment 1 20 of 60 (Why?)
• Team development of demonstration Web site
• Assignment 2 80 of 60
• Team project

5
Project Management

• Coordination of human and material resources
  through a project to achieve pre-determined
  objectives of
• scope,
• cost,
• time,
• quality and participant satisfaction.
• Commercial, personal technical skills

6
Why Worry?

• What is a successful project?
• Success rates 
• 28 failed
• 46 affected by cost and time over-runs
• 26 succeeded
• Developing significant programs is hard and the
  problems are more to do with planning,
  organisation, and monitoring than with computer
  technology.

7
Examples

• Millennium Bug
• Ariane 5
• London Ambulance
• Denver Baggage Handling
• Child Support Agency

8
Development Project Problems

• Unforeseen costs
• Delays
• Defects (bugs, errors, faults, failures)
• Dissatisfied users
• Lives put at risk

9
Is software worse?

• Project problems are common
• Software, hardware, construction, engineering
• Is software different?
• Increasing complexity of software products
• Increasing user expectations
• Functionality usability
• Flexibility

10
Causes of the Problems

• Team development
• Long development time
• Too large for one person to understand
• Mixed language programming
• Real-time and concurrency issues
• Apparent ease of modification
• Change control

11
More Causes

• Impossibility of exhaustive testing
• Software has a lifetime of years
• Maintenance enhancement
• Same software on different systems
• Portability
• (e.g. HTML, PC/Mac, UNIX/Windows)
• Configuration control

12
End user client problems

• Variety of users
• Identifying user needs
• Developing user documentation
• Designing an appropriate user interface

13
Commercial considerations

• Markets
• Sales
• Contracts legal issues
• Reliability reputation

14
Tackling project problems

• Know the business goals
• Get the team right enthusiastic
• Use an appropriate process
• (trad vs. rad)
• Plan, monitor react
• Get the specification right
• Get the design right
• Systematically ensure quality

15
Success Factors

• User involvement ownership
• (its our project)
• Project Champion
• Experienced project manager
• Clear business objectives
• Small milestones
• Firm basic requirements
• Competent staff
• Proper planning

16
Project Management Issues

• Planning Estimating, Costing Scheduling
• Risk Management
• Monitoring and Reacting
• Change Control Configuration Management
• Management of People
• Quality Control and Quality Assurance
• Economics - better product at reduced cost
• Legal Professional Issues
• Contracts, commitment and responsibility