Managing a project, particularly a software development one, is never a long quiet river. In addition, the complexity and multiplication of modern projects often result in lack of control that can have very bad consequences.
Unfortunately, or luckily, it is nothing new so there are solutions to manage projects more effectively and take control of the everyday tasks.
The 5 tools that we would like to emphasize for good software development and that help the required project tasks to be successful are:
Project planning and control
With an enriched GANTT diagram: after defining the list and decomposition of the tasks to be carried out in the project, their dependencies, duration, assigned resources and efforts, they can be scheduled and later monitored periodically using an enriched GANTT diagram containing all above information.
Requirements management
The control of the customer requirements, through the software requirements until their final tests and validation is of vital importance since they define the objectives (normally changing) of the project that must be kept controlled and agreed with the customer.
Traceabily
Ensuring consistency of the development lifecycle results with the customer requirements is of vital importance in all projects: we must not implement elements that are not required, nor should omit the implementation of any requirements. Traceability matrices in both directions at each stage of the development lifecycle are is of vital importance for maintaining the consistency and completeness of the product under development. It is important to analyze bidirectional traceability matrices (from software requirements to customer requirements, software design to software requirements, from code to design and requirements, tests versus requirements, and all vice versa).
Management of problems and changes
It is vital to have a tool that, at all times, helps to manage:
- every problem encountered (whether it is in documents, in code or in tests)
- the changes, not only to the requirements requested by the customer, but the changes necessary to solve many of the problems encountered.
Project repository and version management
To ensure and maintain the integrity and composition of the product’s baseline (all the documents and files) at all times and to manage the different versions of each element. It is necessary to have a version management tool and a project repository which, in addition, helps to keep previous versions and to be able to recover them if necessary.