MONITORING AND CONTROLLING SOFTWARE DEVELOPMENT PROJECTS.

Software development projects are seldom able to be planned so accurately that the plans predict exactly what will happen during the project. Project managers must monitor the project and make changes either to the project’s activities or to the plan itself. Yet much of the project management literature gives only cursory attention to the problem of monitoring and controlling the project. To investigate how project managers regard software development projects, this paper examines software development from the perspectives of two extremes: software development as a production problem and software development as a design problem. Empirical evidence was analyzed and it was found that software development is viewed as a production problem by most project managers. The research highlighted that a relatively simple test could guide project managers toward tailoring their project monitoring and control activities to better suit the project type