Chapter 3. People, Process, and Tools

Successful software projects balance the emphasis on people, process, and tools to fit the work at hand. These are not the only characteristics that need balancing on a successful business project. You can probably think of other attributes that are important. We have found that people, process, and tools (or managing technology) are key factors in making a software project successful. How you balance them depends upon your environment and project. This is where the forces of cost, quality, schedule, market conditions, and many others come into play.

This chapter describes our philosophy about people, process, and tools on software projects. We provide specific suggestions, in the form of guidelines, to help you on your own project. We hope this chapter helps you understand where we are coming from and what we value.

Few projects have a perfect balance of people, process, and tools. Usually, one or more will be emphasized over the others, often with good reason. However, when the emphasis is too great on one of the three, project success is seriously jeopardized. We will consider what can happen when things get out of balance at the end of the chapter.