Being a Project Manager
I am a software project manager at a booming Fortune 500 company having just been promoted from a position as a software engineer. I have been assigned to an on-going software development project because the previous manager left the company to take a job with one of our competitors. After meeting with my new team and reading the project documentation, I have an overall picture of the problem that my boss wants me to solve: we are four months behind schedule and our customer is furious. Our company is in danger of permanently losing this corporate customer. Many team members are already staying late and coming in on Saturdays. Stress levels are skyrocketing. The project is largely finished, but testing is taking forever. The team keeps finding more defects in the software, and when they fix the problems that they know about, they unwittingly create new problems. The software needs to be cleaned up and shipped as soon as possible. In order to expedite the conclusion of this project, I will start out by holding a meeting to plan the rest of the project by addressing the following: the morale of the engineers and relations with the customer, the testing process, and the conclusion.The first thing I will deal with is t
I will stress strong communication between the teams. They will review the class diagrams to make sure nothing was overlooked. The code review will follow a down-top pattern, where the lowest level procedures that do not depend on others are examined first. The teams will cooperate using an open paradigm organization, which involves heavy communication and consensus-based decision making. I will reaffirm our vision of completing the software and the impact it will have for our customer and our company. To further reduce the frenzy, I will not require anyone to work extra hours or come in on Saturdays; it is optional. he stress among the software engineers. When the project is finished and ready to be shipped, we will contact the customer and complete the transaction. We will explain what we have achieved, how we achieved it, and what lessons we have learned on the way. I have learned from experience that when dealing with a large software project, a disciplined and structured review is more suited for capturing the majority of the defects than a rigorous debugging session, which generally leads to more complex system behaviors. Using data collected during the ordeal, we will complete a Project and Process Data and a Summary Report. We will explain about the problems we encountered and also explain how we surmounted or evaded them. Defects will be recorded in a Defect Recording Log and the time will be noted in a Time Recording Log. I will bring in an independent third party to perform most of the actual testing of test cases to ensure the highest probability of finding errors and to ease the workload for the engineers. Altogether, my first assignment as a project manager will allow me to learn a great deal about software engineering and prepare me for future software developments.
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,
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Acceptance Essays
