"Reflections on Software Management" Reading Notes

Key Points

1. Manage Your Projects: Quality improvement is a never-ending journey. To deliver high-quality products, we need to formulate and maintain plans.
2. Manage Your Team: Team collaboration often outperforms individual efforts. We should know how to be a better part of an efficient team and how to build and manage an effective team.
3. Manage Your Leadership: Learn to negotiate with managers and persuade them to adopt better practices.
4. Manage Yourself: Learn to manage your time at work, avoid procrastination, keep commitments, and as a leader, set an example for the team.

Excerpts

Part One: Manage Your Projects

Chapter 1: Delivering High-Quality Products

1. To ensure consistent quality in the software development process, the following 8 steps must be followed:
   1. Establish quality control strategies, goals, and plans
   2. Properly train, guide, and support developers and their teams
   3. Establish and maintain a quality management process for software requirements
   4. Establish and maintain statistical control of the software engineering process
   5. Review, inspect, and evaluate all product artifacts
   6. Assess all defects, correct them, and use them to identify, correct, and prevent similar issues
   7. Establish and maintain configuration management and change control systems
   8. Continuously improve the development process.
2. The quality of software products should be defined as the usability of the product to the user. High-quality programs can only be developed with clear requirements.
3. Quality is a never-ending journey, and the stages in this quality journey include:
   • Testing and correcting
   • Inspection
   • Local evaluation
   • Quality assigned to individuals
   • Personal evaluation
   • Design
   • Defect prevention
   • User-based evaluation.
4. Goals are important for two main reasons:
   • They provide a focus for effort
   • They establish a priority.

Chapter 2: Planning for High-Quality Projects

1. The hardest times to make plans are also when plans are most needed. When project teams face immense delivery pressure, they must not compromise and should insist on making a plan.
2. Plans can be divided into two types: phase plans and product plans. Since your work will be presented in the form of products, and your life is divided into phases, both product plans and phase plans are equally important to you.
3. All your projects or important work should have a product plan, which will help you estimate how long the work will take and when you will complete it, as well as help you track progress during the work. A qualified product plan should include three items:
   • Specifications of the product to be produced and important performance indicators
   • Estimated time required for the work
   • Schedule forecasts.
4. Create a detailed plan and review it with your manager.
5. Five basic requirements that a plan must meet: easy to understand, clear and concise, detailed and specific, precise and meticulous, and accurate.
6. If you cannot make the plan accurate, then plan frequently. Through a dynamic planning process, the project team can assess the impact of each requirement change on the project, and changes should only be made when the manager understands and agrees to necessary adjustments to the schedule and resources. Dynamic planning can also prevent scope creep.

Part Two: Manage Your Team

Chapter 3: Essential Elements of an Efficient Team

1. Seven common problems faced by teams: ineffective leadership, lack of compromise or collaboration, lack of participation, procrastination and lack of confidence, poor quality, feature creep, ineffective peer reviews.

2. Four conditions essential for an efficient team: cohesion, goals, feedback, and a common work framework.

3. Three elements of team communication: transparency, listening, negotiation.

4. The lifecycle of a team:

   1. Formation: No clear functional descriptions and plans; new team members are relatively passive.
   2. Turbulence: A very emotional period where the team is usually unclear about how to proceed and feels challenged by many unknown factors.
   3. Norming: The team begins to solve problems, sets goals, clarifies roles, decides strategies, and formulates plans.
   4. Performing: The team presents the plan to superiors, and once accepted by management, begins to execute the work.

5. Three types of groups: work groups focus on tasks, process groups focus on internal dynamics, and adversarial groups fight against external threats. When a team's behavior resembles that of a process or adversarial group, it cannot work effectively, and careful examination of team behavior and discussions with members are needed to understand what is troubling them, followed by direct handling of their concerns with team leaders.

6. Typical characteristics of self-directed teams:

   • A sense of team spirit and belonging
   • Commitment to team goals
   • Ownership of processes and plans
   • Skills in planning and discipline in executing plans
   • Pursuit of excellence

   These teams typically design their own development strategies, formulate plans, and proactively complete high-quality work.

Chapter 4: Being an Effective Team Member

1. Your willingness to actively fulfill commitments largely depends on how the commitment is made. First, commitments must be voluntary; second, they must be public; and third, to make responsible commitments, you must be prepared.
2. All new ideas start from a minority of one. If you are that person, you must take responsibility for this new idea and the project team. In many cases, simply asking team members to explain their logic can lead to entirely new perspectives, potentially steering the project team in a completely unexpected direction. This phenomenon is known as synergy.
3. For the team to run smoothly, it is crucial that every member contributes everything they know.
   • Clearly express your views and draw the attention of the work team.
   • Pay attention to others' opinions and accept help.
4. Obligations created by the team:
   • Accept responsibility as a team member and do your best to fulfill your role.
   • Participate in determining team goals and plans, and strive to achieve them.
   • Establish and maintain an efficient and collaborative team.
5. Principled negotiation:
   • Participants—participants are problem solvers.
   • Goals—efficiently and amicably reach a wise outcome.
   • Method—separate people from the problem.
   • Trust—do not talk about trust.
   • Focus—focus on interests rather than positions; explore interests.
   • Bottom line—avoid setting a bottom line.
   • Options—create conditions for win-win outcomes.
   • Decisions—prepare multiple options to choose from and decide later.
   • Standards—adhere to objective standards.
   • Will—attempt to reach an outcome based on standards unrelated to will.
   • Pressure—open debate, yielding to principles rather than pressure.
6. The effectiveness of principled negotiation: it avoids the polarization of positions. The foundation of principled negotiation: recognizing that positions are merely a way to satisfy interests.

Chapter 5: Leading and Guiding Your Team

1. For work teams, three key motivators are: fear, greed, and commitment. For development work, greed and fear are not appropriate motivators.
2. Credible team commitments have four requirements:
   • Voluntary—requests, not commands.
   • Visible—negotiated publicly.
   • Credible—supported by plans.
   • Acknowledged—the team makes its own plans.
3. Create a sense of urgency with short-term goals. One of the challenges of leadership is helping team members set intermediate goals.
4. Techniques for involving all team members:
   • Ask questions, don’t speak first.
   • Play dumb.
   • Frequently check agreements.
   • Sense unspoken doubts or disagreements.
   • Don’t let one person dominate the discussion.
   • Manage experts.
   • Guide team leaders.
   • Focus on facts and data.
   • Do not allow bystanders.
5. Involve management in decision-making and encourage management team members to work together.
6. Four elements of rational management:
   • When determining product or action goals, check current work conditions and establish action goals based on business objectives.
   • Plan for short-term goals.
   • Assess and track the completion of plans and supervise the discipline of work execution.
   • Continuously monitor business execution.

Part Three: Manage Your Leadership

Chapter 6: Discussing Projects and Defending Your Plans

1. First, maintain a positive attitude toward work and genuinely strive for a more reasonable delivery date.
2. Focus the team on the highest priority tasks, which are the current work tasks. Before making any changes, be sure to understand what impact these changes may have on the work.
3. Autocratic behavior is inefficient and can sometimes backfire. Unilateral planning is also a form of authoritarian management, which rarely includes team contributions; the team should be genuinely involved in formulating their own plans.
4. When your manager is caught up in current short-term issues, you must shift your focus to some effective, realistic measures.

Part Four: Manage Yourself

Chapter 7: Control Your Work

1. Steps needed to change work methods:
   1. Determine quality goals.
   2. Measure product quality.
   3. Understand the process.
   4. Adjust the process.
   5. Apply the adjusted process.
   6. Measure results.
   7. Compare results with goals.
   8. Cycle and continuously improve.
2. You need to track your work time and develop the habit of using a time log for recording.
3. The main reason for software project failures is often teamwork issues rather than technical issues. A serious "human disaster" is that software teams do not handle pressure well. By guiding project teams through strategy and planning processes, TSP demonstrates how teams should handle pressure. They analyze work, study strategies for completing work, estimate the scale of the products they will produce, and based on this, formulate plans.
4. Management commitments:
   • Analyze work before agreeing to commitments.
   • Support commitments with plans.
   • Record agreements in writing.
   • If unable to fulfill a commitment, inform the other party immediately and strive to minimize the impact.

Chapter 8: Learn to Lead

1. Leaders must set an example for the team. You cannot expect team members to be more responsible, work harder, or be more meticulous than you.
2. Symptoms of poor leadership:
   • Senior managers are self-centered and have a narrow vision when thinking about issues.
   • "Bureaucratic inertia," where the status quo is considered reasonable, and any increase or change requires arduous effort to get approved.
   • Managers lack the ability to make effective decisions in a timely manner.
   • Some leadership styles are too fixated on change, causing the organization to be in constant turmoil.
3. Intrinsic motivation/transformational leadership: strive to ignite enthusiasm in employees for goals and persuade them to follow you in achieving them. This contrasts with the common so-called extrinsic motivation/transactional leadership. Your goal must be to become a transformational leader.
4. As a leader, you do have some limited power, and you must decide where to use it. Although many issues you see may be frustrating, focus your energy on matters that truly impact work rather than complaining about others.

Author Introduction

Watts S. Humphrey
ACM Fellow, IEEE Life Fellow, Senior Researcher at the Software Engineering Institute (SEI) of Carnegie Mellon University, founder of SEI Software Process Research, inventor of the SEI Software Process Maturity Model. He was awarded the National Medal of Technology by the President of the United States in 2005. He worked at IBM for 27 years, serving as Vice President of Technical Research, overseeing the development of all IBM software products. He is also a pioneer of PSP and TSP. In addition to this book, Humphrey has authored 12 other influential books in the field of software management and process improvement, including "TSP: Leading Development Teams" and "TSP: Training Development Teams."

William R. Thomas
Director of the SEI Technical Communication Team, with nearly 30 years of experience in communications, public relations, and journalism, having managed the business and technology sections of several newspapers in Youngstown, Ohio, and Galveston, Texas.