- Describe what you did, what you learned, your weekly activities, in what ways are you able to apply the ideas and concepts gained, and finally, describe one important thing that you are thinking about in relation to the activity
This unit’s main topic was the project management in the context of software development, and the responsibilities of the software engineer a.k.a. project manager. About more than half of the reading material was about project management generally, and other parts were more concentrated on software development. Throughout the last week, I could take an overview of the common application types in software industry and the major software development lifecycles (SDLCs), which are familiar to me as I studied them in the first SWE course. In my opinion, I found many content in Conger’s textbook outdated, especially the usage of terminology. For example, nowadays, it is common to call the transactional software a CRUD application (Create-Read-Update-Delete). Also some technologies such as the types of mentioned databases in the first chapter aren’t commonly used today as far as I know, except the relational databases. I think this is normal as the textbook is originally published in 2008.
On the other hand, the project management concepts were totally new to me, and Jenkins textbook was really interesting and clear for beginner like me. Also the project planning and administrative procedures in the Conger’s textbook were informative, and I think I can back to the chapter 3 and 4 later as a reference some day when I am getting hired as a project manager and managing projects and people!
- Compare and contrast individual interviews and meetings, listing two purposes that are the same for both techniques and two that are different. Compare Structured and Unstructured interviews and Open-ended questions and Closed-ended questions.
In both techniques, interviews and meetings, people talk to each others to share the necessary information that are required for completing or kicking-off the project. In individual interviews, the number of parties is small, and they talk to each other conveniently, project managers ask questions, collect information, and negotiate. In the interview session, and because the number of parties is limited, speakers can talk about the project details as they will have time to do so.
As for meetings, they are more formal usually and scheduled, good meetings also have agendas that are prepared beforehand and sent to the attendees, containing outlines of the topics to be discussed. There are key organizers in the meetings also who manage the session, for example, the project manager would be the key representative of the software development team. On the other side, the client representative also might be either a project manager or a department head assigned by the company to coordinate the implementation of the project. Other attendees might be software engineers or other figures from other departments in the client’s company who can provide detailed requirements from their point of view.
The meetings should be usually structured and well planned, and both meetings and interview should have an aimed output (e.g. get the detailed requirement about feature A in the app). Unstructured interviews can be quick calls checking in on the status of some deliverables or asking for the customer feedback, where the conversation cannot be planned.
Open-ended questions are raised with unlimited possibilities of answers which are formulated as normal sentences, whereas closed-ended questions are similar to “select one/multiple option(s)” questions where the respondent is limited to a set of options to choose from. We use both formats in everyday conversations, but I think that choosing which type of question is critical in data collection in business. For example, ass a software project manager, I can use the closed-ended question with the client who is not sure about his requirement or who don’t know how to express his ideas correctly. This way, I can help him organize his ideas and therefore I can record his requirements correctly.