Leading a Development Team

This three-day course is designed to teach first-line managers or team leaders how to manage projects quantitatively in order to complete projects on schedule, within budget, and with all requirements met. The course covers the knowledge and skills leaders need to effectively lead and coach development teams.

Quality is not achieved by accident. Quality must be planned for and tracked to ensure project goals are achieved. This course provides examples of practical leading and lagging quality indicators, which leaders can use in guiding their decisions. By controlling quality, schedule and budgets become more predictable. The relationship between quality and its impact on cost and schedule is also discussed, along with quantitative techniques used to manage them.

Software is developed by teams of individuals, thus processes are needed in order to successfully develop quality software. However, organizations still struggle when trying to apply disciplined methods in the software process. Historically, this struggle has been due to a lack of operational procedures that teams and individuals can use to develop software in a disciplined fashion. Through the use of the Team Software Process(TSP) leaders will be given an example of both a strategy and a set of operational procedures using disciplined software process methods at the individual and team levels. At the individual level, the Personal Software Process (PSP) shows managers and engineers how and why to plan and track their projects, demonstrates the principles and benefits of effective quality management, and involves the engineers in process measurement, management, and improvement. At the team level, the TSP builds accurate, achievable plans for software project teams, provides a formal team-building process, and provides the mechanism for tracking progress against project plans.

Who should attend?

First-level software managers who directly manage software development, such as

• software project managers
• software team leaders
• supervisors

Topics

• discuss how to measure and manage development quality and produce quality products using quantitative methods
• provide an overview of the team leader's responsibilities and ways to lead and motivate the team
• discuss how to effectively build work plans and negotiate commitments with management
• understand quantitative process data at the team level and how to lead the team based on the data
• discuss how to track the team's status against its plan and maintain its commitment to management
• discuss maintaining quality during software development
• show how to report status to management
• discuss how to handle leadership challenges
• provide an overview of the TSP and how it works to build self-directed, high-performance teams
• show how team management works on a TSP team
• discuss the role of the team leader

An accompanying letter details the pre-course reading assignments. It is important that attendees read the assigned chapters before coming to the course.

Objectives

• describe how the use of operational procedures and data can be effectively used by teams and individuals, can improve software development activities and provide positive motivation for engineers and teams
• demonstrate key behaviors for successfully leading and coaching teams
• show how to quantitatively manage projects through the use of effective cost, schedule and quality measures
• describe the basic concepts on which the TSP is built
• provide a working-level understanding of how individuals and teams apply the TSP

Prerequisites

There are no prerequisites for this course.

Materials

After registering for the Leading a Development Team course, attendees receive copies of the books Winning with Software: An Executive Strategy and TSP^SM: Leading a Development Team by Watts Humphrey.

Participants also receive a course notebook with copies of the course slides.

Schedule

This 3-day course meets at the following times:
Days 1-2, 8:30 a.m. - 5:00 p.m. (U.S. locations)
Day 3, 8:30 a.m. - 3:00 p.m. (U.S. locations)