Project management deals with initiating, planning, monitoring, and controlling the activities required to fulfill the project commitments, and reporting their status to the project stakeholders. The software development process deals with the technical aspects required to complete a project or product. A sound development process needs to follow Software Engineering fundamentals and take into consideration requirements analysis, functional and technical specifications, data and object orientation models, documentation standards, software testing, software maintenance, software quality assurance, and configuration management.
In order to be successful in developing software systems or products the project management process and software development process must be integrated. To manage a project one must know some basic methodologies such as: Project Management Institute, Microsoft Solutions Framework, Software Engineering Institute Capability Maturity Model (CMM), IEEE, and Rational Rose Unified Process.
In this paper Information Systems (IS) development is defined as software development done by an organization for a single customer/client. This usually is customized work undertaken by the organization on request by a customer. In contrast, Software Product (SP) development is software development done by an organization for multiple customers. It could encompass periodic new releases and is often shrink wrapped. Exhibit 1 presents a process commonly used for IS development.
