The Development and Evaluation of A Progress Monitoring Prototype Tool for Software Project Management

Progress monitoring is an essential task of the Software Project Management (SPM), which is executed during the development process of software projects. In the market today, several tools are available for monitoring the progress of a project. However, most of these tools lack sufficient progress monitoring mechanisms, making them unattractive for many organizations. Moreover, some of the tools do not report and/or visualize useful information regarding the project status. To address these limitations, this study investigates some of the common tools used by Software Development Organizations (SDOs), which leverage on project management approaches and the concept of Agile methods. The SPM tools' pros and cons were identified through a literature survey. The key limitations were highlighted to show the gap in this area that led to the inception of this study. Resultantly, a Progress Monitoring Prototype Tool (PM-PT) was developed to overcome the limitations of the existing tools used in SPM. Subsequently, PM-PT was tested and evaluated by interviewing seven software practitioners. The initial results indicate that PM-PT is a useful and effective tool for software project monitoring task. Future work will focus on improving PM-PT based on the constructive suggestions and recommendations provided by the software practitioners.

I. Introduction

Software project management (SPM) plays an important role in software development organizations (SDOs), whereby it requires accurate information and experience to inform the decision making process [1]. One of the essential tasks in SPM is progress monitoring, which is executed during the development process of software projects. It applies the knowledge, skills, techniques and tools to project activities in order to ensure that the project's progress goes as planned [2]. However, this has been proven as a major challenge for SDOs, whereby many projects still fail due to time or cost metrics, or poor quality [3], [4].