Software Project Delivery Essentials

It’s been a long road to get to where we are, smack in the middle of the ongoing “software crisis.” Many software projects end in partial or complete failure, and the path to delivery is rife with challenges. This course is for you if you want to understand the different elements in play to delivering software and how they work together to provide a path to success. We’ll start with how changes in the release cycle have affected delivery and move on to understand the fundamental nature of change and how different types of change affect delivery differently. We’ll move on to covering planning and how to do it successfully within an environment of change. Planning is no good without execution, so we’ll dig into the difference between the two and how one leads seamlessly into the other. Of course, you don’t know what to plan if you don’t understand what to build, so we’ll talk about the challenges of requirements gathering and why it is so critical to get right. Bugs in your requirements are many times worse than bugs in your code. Another aspect of planning is estimation, which can be a fraught exercise. Estimation is both science and art, and there are many pressures to say what you think people want to hear rather than speaking the truth. Finally, we’ll move on to the execution phase of the project and the importance of clarity and honesty in day to day work. Risk must be managed and people have to be wrangled. Speaking of wrangling people, we’ll touch on day-to-day management of your team. Delivering software can be hard, but with the right soft skills, success is within reach.