Improving Software Engineering Through Holistic Project Coaching

The process to successfully engineer quality software suffers from challenges identified over 40 years ago. Upon deeper review, a majority of the factors related to software development failure are human factors. Including a Project Coach (PC) who is focused on humanistic issues in the software engineering process will have a positive impact in addressing software engineering challenges. A PC focuses on Knowledge Management (KM), cyclical assessment, informal learning, and dynamics coaching to ensure team harmony and growth, sound project management practices, and most importantly– quality, on time software. The 1968 NATO International Software Engineering Conference [1] in Munich, Germany, raised a series of complaints about computer software including its unreliable nature, late delivery, cost-prohibitive nature of modification, challenges in maintenance, inadequate performance, and budget cost excesses. This conference resulted in the coining of the phrase “software engineering.” Over 40 years later, the software engineering field has failed to significantly diminish or eliminate many of these serious complaints. An IEEE Spectrum article entitled “Why Software Fails” [2] cites 12 common failure factors: 1. Unrealistic or unarticulated project goals 2. Inaccurate estimates of needed resources 3. Badly defined system requirements 4. Poor reporting of the project’s status 5. Unmanaged risks 6. Poor communication among customers, developers, and users 7. Use of immature technology 8. Inability to handle the project’s complexity 9. Sloppy development practices 10. Poor project management 11. Stakeholder politics 12. Commercial pressures While the article categorized deficiencies into technical, project management, and business decision deficiencies, it can also be noted that nine of the 12 factors are human factors. A recent focus has been placed on management and people issues in the software development process. This focus on the importance of people in the software engineering process has appeared in early works ranging from McGregor’s [3] Theory X Theory Y to Deming’s [4] Total Quality Management approach. To further quantify the impact of people in the software development process, both the Constructive Cost Model [5] and Software Evaluation and Estimation of Resources (SEER) [6] software estimation models forecast the relative impact of the development environment parameters. The most important parameter group (Staff Capability) shows a relative cost impact of 0.5 on the positive side and greater than 2.2 on the negative side (see Figure 1). Figure 1: Relative cost impact of the Constructive Cost Model and SEER environment parameters A second aspect relative to the importance of people in the product–process–people triad is the generational diversity that is now representative of a majority of the workforce population. Today’s workforce is divided among Baby Boomers; generally described as those born between 1944 and 1966, Generation X; born between 1967 and 1979, through Generation Y; born between 1980 through 1995. Each workforce generation is shaped by key events in their development and results in differing needs, desires and expectations as it relates to work environments. For example, Generation Y has never known a time in which there was no Internet. They have grown up in a “connected” world. This has helped to shape their expectations in terms of teaming, communication, learning and information sharing. There are growing cases of Generation Y Project Managers (PMs) who are now managing Baby Boomers [7]. These dynamics presents new challenges to projects such as software development and, at a minimum, require an awareness of differences in expectations and outlooks. Unless people are considered as an equally important leg supporting the product–process–people triad of software engineering, the results will remain inconsistent and unstable at best.