Men occasionally stumble over the truth, but most of them pick themselves up and hurry off as if nothing had happened. – Winston Churchill
The management of software development is fraught with risk: technical risk, market risk, requirements risk, and financial risk. Nine Best Practices: The Software Management Framework, describes key management principles for guiding the development of a software project. These principles are not original. They are taken directly from the work of Norm Brown, the founder and Executive Director of the Software Program Managers Network (SPMN).
SPMN is a consortium of the Department of Defense Program Managers who are dedicated to improving the practice of managing software acquisition and development projects in both commercial and government domains. Full credit for the nine principles is given to Mr. Brown and the SPMN.
For companies where software is important to business operations and to the products that they market, excellence in software is a vital business goal. However, software has long been one of the most troublesome technologies of the 20th century, and one that has long been resistant to executive control.
One of the main reasons that software is difficult to control is because it has been difficult to estimate software projects and to measure software quality and productivity in an accurate way. — Capers Jones
