Search

Software Project Management (SPM) is considered the key driver for the success or failure of software projects. Project failure is caused by various factors, the most important of which is poor SPM. Thus, we investigated the needs of practitioners by focusing on Project Management Q&A communities. More precisely, we targeted Stack Exchange to identify the primary needs of software project managers. More than 5000 SPM questions were analyzed from the conceptual model given by the Project Management Body of Knowledge PMBOK. For pre-training of the Machine Learning classifiers, we implemented Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers (BERT) and Doc2Vec text embedding and compared their performance. Our results showed that BERT outperforms Doc2Vec for pre-training in almost all scenarios. Schedule management, followed by resource management, are the main PMBOK knowledge areas of concern for project managers. Among the process groups, the emphasis of the questions is on planning. We compared the findings with the learning and training status quo in 11 top Canadian universities. We analyzed 46 SPM-related courses and found that the rank correlation of PMBOK knowledge areas is 0.23 between the key content of the analyzed courses and the focus of Q&A’s knowledge areas analyzed from Stack Exchange.

Context: Today’s vehicle development is focusing more and more on handling the vast amount of software and hardware inside the vehicle. The resulting planning and development of the software especially confronts original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) with major challenges that have to be mastered. This makes effective and efficient release planning that provides the development scope in the required quality even more important. In addition, the OEMs have to deal with boundary conditions given by the OEM itself and the standards as well as legislation the software and hardware have to conform to. Release planning is a key activity for successfully developing vehicles. Objective: The aim of this work is to introduce release planning patterns to simplify the release planning of software and hardware installed in a vehicle. Method: We followed a pattern identification process that was conducted at Dr. Ing. h. c. F. Porsche AG. Results: We introduce eight release planning patterns, which both address the fixed boundary conditions and structure the actual planning content of a release plan. The patterns address an automotive context and have been developed from a hardware and software point of view based on two examples from the case company. Conclusions: The presented patterns address recurring problems in an automotive context and are based on real life examples. The gathered knowledge can be used for further application in practice and related domains.