Key Practice Areas
Architecture & Design
Software Architecture is designed to allow designers to indicate the significance of architectural concerns in a project and how they intend to support these concerns. Architectural concerns cover the design, analysis, and achievement of systemic properties (e.g., response time, scalability, availability, etc.); serve to guide and constrain construction and analysis; incorporate commitments in legacy code, open source software, and commercial components; coordinate with external development efforts; and enable transition of the system to future development and maintenance teams.
Software Construction
This practice area concentrates on the construction and management of software artifacts produced to implement a project. Teams should show competence in: (a) managing code artifacts (e.g., version and configuration management), (b) developing policies for managing its construction (e.g., coding practices/standards, code-focused processes such as TDD if that is relevant, pair-programming or other agile development techniques), (c) integration and validation with architecture and requirements, (d) issue management, and (e) managing software deployment and delivery to clients. Teams should document plans and practices, track compliance, and maintain traceability between this and other related activities (e.g., architecture, quality).
Planning & Tracking
This practice area concentrates on the establishment of plans that define project activities and the understanding of the project’s progress so that appropriate corrective actions can be taken when the project’s performance deviates significantly from the plan. Teams should show competence in: (a) developing strategic plans, (b) developing tactical plans, (c) tracking the work progress, and (d) updating the corresponding plans in response to deviations. Teams should document plans and practices, track compliance, and maintain traceability between this and other related activities (e.g., architecture, quality).
Quality Management
This practice area concentrates on quality management tasks and activities on the project. This should include establishing quality mechanisms consistent with the needs of the client and the project, and may include prevention as well as detection mechanisms. Teams should collect, and have available, basic quality plans and metrics consistent with progress on the project. For example, preconstruction teams/projects would have initial plans for what quality mechanisms and metrics are planned for the duration of the project, whereas during construction teams/projects could collect metrics on defects.
Requirements Management
This practice area concentrates on the requirements gathering, analysis, validation and verification activities needed to ensure that the software development team is building the right software. This includes identifying the business objectives that drive the software requirements, ensuring that all stakeholders and their needs are accounted for, and documenting and tracing requirements to downstream activities where they are needed to make important design and quality assurance decisions. It is common to surface business and technical risks and obstacles during these activities, and to introduce requirements to manage those risks.
Risk Management
This practice area concentrates on risk management tasks and activities on the project. This should include basic project risk management such as: process/plan to address risk management on the team/project to enable identification of risk and mitigation strategy, risk assessment including probability/impact/severity/priority/exposure, and ongoing monitoring/tracking. Teams should document plans and practices, track that these are being followed, and maintain traceability between this and other related activities (e.g., construction, planning, requirements etc.).