Chapter 13. SOA-Driven Project Management

Modern project management methodologies have an interesting and eventful history. One of the earliest projects that adopted rigorous project management processes was the Manhattan Project in the 1940s, in which the United States developed the first nuclear weapon, a massive research and engineering undertaking [Gro83]. In the 1970s, practitioners in industries such as defense and construction started to adopt project management methodologies. The 1990s saw a migration toward project management methodologies, starting with TQM in the mid-80s, process reengineering in the early '90s, risk management and project offices in the late '90s, and the currently ongoing wave of mergers, acquisitions, and global projects of the new century.

Some of the generic project management practices and tools are directly applicable to software development. Gantt charts and network diagrams are frequently used not only in construction industry projects but also in software projects. Generic project management standards such as PRINCE 2 address organization, plans, controls, stages, risk management, and quality, configuration, and change control, all of which also apply to any software project. Today, a wide variety of project management methodologies address the specifics of software development projects, ranging from the simple and widely used waterfall model to sophisticated, iterative models such as Rational Unified Process or Catalysis.

As in the remainder of this book, this chapter is based on the assumption that the projects we are looking at are related to enterprise architectures, including packaged applications and bespoke software, with complex dependencies and integration requirements.

In this chapter, we limit the discussion of generic software development project management methodologies to a brief introduction. Our focus is on understanding how aspects of SOA can be used in the context of some of these established project management methodologies in a complementary manner. We introduce the concept of SOA-driven project management, configuration management, and testing from the perspective of the project manager.