Welcome to the Course, Spring 2009

Dear student of course T-76.5612 Software Project Management,

Welcome to the course, and to the course blog!

As the topic suggests, this course is about software projects, and how to manage them. We will be discussing several aspects of software project management, especially focusing on following issues:

• What is a software project?
  
• Constraints, goals and types of a software project
  
• Software processes in software project management
  
• Software project estimation
  
• Budgeting, scheduling and monitoring software project
  
• Software quality and risk management
  
• Leadership and management in software projects
  
• Distributed software development
  

In addition to lectures given by the course personnel, we will have guest lectures from industry with varying topics. As software project management is an art that cannot be fully taught or studied from theoretical perspective, I encourage you to explore all possibilities to exploit their insights and experience on software project management - you may learn how to do so with the lectures given by course personnel! Thus, I encourage you to be active during the lectures and throughout the course.

In addition to intellectual debates, it is worth to remember, that we are all human, and mistakes can and will occur; in any case you don't understand what is being said, or course arrangements just doesn't make sense to you, please ask!

The authoritative source of information for the course assignments is the course page in Noppa portal. Please make sure you have subscribed to course news, either by email or RSS. More specific instructions how to do so are available at the Noppa portal.

This blog will serve as auxillary communication channel during the course. Passing the course is completely possible without ever reading this blog, but more detailed insights and discussion about lecture topics and other interesting issues will be posted on this blog. As a rule, we aim at posting to blog after each lecture, to summarize the points from the lecture, as well as raise some important issues. We will also answer to any questions, in case any is raised (either in the lecture, or afterwards).

That said, I'd like to have active participation and discussion on the blog, for two reasons. Firstly, I hope interacting with you on this blog over the topics of the course will help both you and me to understand the discussed issues more deeply. Secondly, the blog can serve as very informal, yet effective feedback channel, so in case you have any suggestions or worries about the course format, exercises or software project management in general, please post a comment.

In this course, we will embrace activity. Therefore extra points will be awarded based on activity, both during lectures and in the blog.