Finally . . . a one-day professional development seminar that can teach program managers how to apply best and sustaining practices to software intensive programs! Come and learn the secret to successful commercial and DoD software project management and software project technical management.

The Software Program Manager's Network's (SPMN's) Road Map and Metrics for Successful Software Project Practice is the key to avoiding significant problems for software development projects. Get an in-depth briefing on the following 16 best and sustaining practices in:

Management Control:
1. Formal Risk Management
2. Empirical Cost and Schedule Estimation
3. Metrics-Based Project Management
4. Earned Value Tracking
5. Defect Tracking Against Quality Targets
6. People Aware Program Management

Construction Control:
7. Configuration Management
8. End to End Requirements Tracing
9. System Architecture Based Software Design
10. Data and Database Interoperability
11. Formal Definition & Control of Interfaces
12. Visible & Inspectable Design
13. Cost and Quality Justified Reuse

Product & Stability Control:
14. Formal Inspections
15. Managing Tests as Assets
16. Frequent Compile and Smoke Testing

The SPMN has gathered these practices from the crucible of real-world, large-scale software development and maintenance. Together they constitute a set of high-leverage disciplines focused on improving a project's bottom line – time to fielding, quality, cost, predictability and customer satisfaction. This professional development seminar defines the essential ingredients of each best and sustaining practice.

Hear how to establish and implement a risk management plan. See how to give the risk officer the authority to identify and manage risk –whether cost, schedule, technical, staffing, external dependencies, supportability, maintainability or programmatic. Learn what are the risk resolution (e.g., prototyping) and risk mitigation (e.g., engineering trade-off studies) strategies and how to do weekly updates of risk databases and critical path management.

Learn how to reconcile software cost estimating between a top-down estimate (based on a cost model) and a bottom-up engineering estimate. Hear how to develop and maintain a hierarchical (predecessor/successor) task activity network. Find the way to: define and insert specific risk mitigation/resolution tasks into the network; collect earned value metrics [a comparison of budgeted cost of work scheduled (BCWS) and budgeted cost of work performed (BCWP)]; establish quality targets at the design, coding, integration, test and operational levels; and track defects against those targets.

Discover how to develop, implement and maintain a software development plan (SDP). Find out how to utilize effectively the SDP's references and traceability matrices with superior project documents, e.g., program, system engineering and total project configuration management, total project quality assurance and the software design and software test plans.

Learn how to define and implement a requirements management plan. See the need to maintain two-way requirements traceability between the system level, code units and individual test cases. Find out how to develop and maintain complete and controlled system and software architectures.

Discover how to choose automated software engineering tools to facilitate automatic data integration.

Hear how to document and maintain all internal and external interfaces under the CM as an interface inventory to permit development on both sides of the interface; design the architectures to facilitate code reuse and minimize modification of reuse software; establish a reuse plan for the integration of COTS, GOTS and in-house software; and evaluate reused functionality against system requirements.

Learn how to find your software development problems early and reduce risk through enhanced metrics-based planning, scheduling and management.

See how a detailed task activity network and the application of earned value optimize program-wide risk management.

Learn how to use a configuration management (CM) plan, including engineering information, reports, analyses, test information and user and operational data, to implement a single CM process to control formal baselines. See how to use the plan for control and status accounting of problem reports and engineering change proposals. Hear how to benefit from including version control of all commercial-off-the-shelf (COTS) and government-off-the-shelf (GOTS) software products.

Learn how the formal inspection process and testing based on a configuration management plan can make for successful and stable technical management.

• Software testing including a traceable white-box test process verifying implemented software against CM controlled design documentation and the requirements traceability matrix.
• Black box testing of integration builds will include functional, interface, error recovery, stress and out- of-bounds input testing.
• Designing test suites under configuration management to test automatically all the required functionality of the system.
• Implementing a formal, structured peer review process (Fagan-type inspections) that will begin with the first system requirements products and continue through the architecture, design, code and documentation products.
• Using successful completion of inspections to act as the task exit criteria for earned value metrics and others and as gates to place items under increasing levels of CM control.