Experience teaching software project management in both industrial and academic settings

Abstract

This paper relates seven years of experience teaching Software Project Management both in academia as part of an undergraduate software engineering program and to software engineering graduate students, and to practitioners in industry. It explains some of the difficulties and constraints for such a course. It describes the current syllabus and its rationale. The course is constructed based on a conceptual model of software development that accommodates a wide range of process models, traditional and agile, large and small. The course is illustrated by drawing from a range of concrete processes: RUP®, DSDM®, MSF®, Scrum and XP, of software engineering standards (from IEEE and ISO) and a few project management tools. The paper then maps this course to the IEEE SWEBOK (Software Engineering Body Of Knowledge), to IEEE Standard 1490, better known as the PMBOK (Project Management Body of Knowledge), and more particularly to the recent IEEE-CS/ACM SE2004 (Software Engineering Curriculum 2004), showing how the course can be made an integral part of a well-rounded software engineering program.