Methodology Improvement For Small/Medium Size Software Development Project

Many small or medium size software development projects ran into problems due to the lack of optimal method and scientific management which caused delayed delivery, over budget or even project failure. Some software development companies tried to make improvement by adopting the "popular" software development methods or bringing in quality control mechanisms but always dissatisfied with the result. New problems usually came up after the original problems being solved. We believe that lacking of the right software development methodology for the project is the root cause of the project failure. To make improvement on the problem, we analyzed various software development methods in detail from software engineering perspective. We took into consideration the real situation of those companies and projects and provided some advises aiming at those problems.First of all, we discussed relationship between software engineering and software development method and introduced software development activities which are the composite units of software development methods. Then we introduced heavyweight software development method including "waterfall" software development model Capability Maturity Model (CMM) software development model, Rational Unified Process (RUP) method, six sigma and other quality improvement method using in software development area as well. Started from history of agile software development method and establishment of "agile alliance", we also introduced lightweight software development method named as agile software development which is in the spotlight these years. The typical lightweight methods such as XP, crystal methods, OSS, ASD, SCRUM, FDD, DSDM and AM methods were introduced in this thesis as well.We took a representational small size software development project as an example. By careful analysis we found out the existing problems in the project development phase. These problems can be categorized into external environment issues and internal management issues. In fact they are common problems for other small or medium size software development projects in China as well. We analyzed the possible results we can get if we use heavyweight method or lightweight method to solve those problems. The conclusion is neither pure heavyweight method nor pure lightweight method could address all of those issues. The only effective way is to take advantages of different methods and combine them together. The purpose of this combined method we discussed in this thesis is to guide software companies start from analysis current problem first, then after setting up their development strategy, they should put effective development tactics into practice by scientific management. In this thesis we firstly using QoS concept to analyze software requirement, we also emphasized diversity in people management. The improved method was used in phase 2 of our example software development project and improvements were achieved.