System Development and Project Organization (Spring 2025)

Abstract

This course is discontinued. Several supervision sessions in course content and objectives will run for students eligible for the extraordinary exam held summer 2024.

The course content will be based on last year’s instance; this includes course book, articles, exercises, etc. Students will be given access to the recordings of last year’s lectures. Supervision sessions will be organized to provide structured access to the course manager, starting with an introductory meeting in which the course setup will be presented.

The goal of this course is to provide students with a broad understanding of the challenges involved in managing a software development project, as well as well-established techniques and tools available to address these challenges.

Description

According to recent studies, IT project success rates internationally are very low, almost one third of them get cancelled and over half of them are challenged. Lack of skilled project management and executive support is stated as the main reason for failure. This course helps to address this problem in the industry by teaching the students taking the course the important skills of software project management.

The goal of this course is to provide students with a broad understanding of the challenges involved in managing a software development project, as well as well-established techniques and tools available to address these challenges. This will allow students to act within a software development project either as team members or as project managers.

The course includes a general introduction to IT project management and the methods and techniques used to manage an IT project. As a whole, the course provides an overview of different models and how they relate to IT project management.

Content:

• Differences and similarities between different development models.
• Different ways to organize the development process, with particular focus on agile and plan-driven methods: waterfall Model and plan driven project management, and Scrum as the method for systems development and project management.
• Systems development and project management in multicultural and distributed teams.

Formal prerequisites

This course is placed on the fourth semester of the BSc in Software Development.
Knowledge of programming and system development.

Intended learning outcomes

After the course, the student should be able to:

• Describe the role of a software project manager
• Explain the content of the various methods and techniques for systems development and project management that are covered in the course
• Identify key characteristics of a software project and critically reflect on which project model better fits such characteristics
• Use a variety of tools and effective techniques for software project management
• Plan and organize a small software project
• Discuss the different challenges related to managing both collocated and distributed software development projects
• Apply techniques and methods of software project management on a small software project

Ordinary exam

Exam type:
D: Submission of written work with following oral, External (7-point scale)
Exam variation:
D22: Submission with following oral exam supplemented by the submission.