Title: Improvised process for quality through quantitative project management: an experience from software development projects

Authors: Sanjay Mohapatra

Addresses: Xavier Institute of Management, Bhubanswar-751013, India

Abstract: In the IT industry, customers want the vendor organisations to deliver defect free software within agreed and negotiated timeframe. This task can be achieved through combination of two approaches – process-oriented approach and quantitative control of the process. The first one deals with defining a process for a project to follow and the second one deal with quantitative project management techniques used to control various parameters to bring process under control. Through these quantitative techniques, quality goals are set at the start of the project during project initiation phase and these goals are monitored at different milestones as defined in the project plan. Through this approach, an early signal can be detected if the process goes out of control. Thus, a combination of process management and quantitative management improves the delivered quality. In this paper, practical and real-time development project experiences have been used to come up with a systematic approach for quantitative project management for better quality of deliverables. The paper discusses different tools and monitoring mechanisms that can be employed during project execution and possible benefits obtained from this approach. The tone of the paper is in prescriptive manner and is based on best practices across different organisations.

Keywords: quantitative project management; software project management; software development projects; defect reduction; quality goal setting; process improvement; process management.

DOI: 10.1504/IJICT.2010.034977

International Journal of Information and Communication Technology, 2010 Vol.2 No.4, pp.355 - 373

Published online: 31 Aug 2010 *

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