Management and Professional Issues

1
Management and Professional Issues

• delivered by John Stockwell

2
Objectives

• At the end of this lecture you should be able to
• evaluate the usefulness of methods available for
  project management
• discuss techniques used in project planning
• demonstrate an awareness of standards and quality
  assurance
• Summarize basic legal and professional concerns
  relating to software developers

3
Project management

• Managing deployment of resources
• What resources are needed?
• When are they needed?
• Plan what needs to be done
• Monitor progress according to plan
• Apply corrective action

4
Project management

• Problems
• Management can be expensive
• Might not lead to a successful conclusion
• Roles involved
• Client
• Developer
• Project Manager

5
Project planning

• What must be done versus what resources do I have
• Plan for availability of resources and risks
• Make contingency plans

6
Project planning

• Estimating
• Identifying tasks
• Scheduling resources
• Using techniques to help
• Gantt charts
• Network charts
• Producing plan

7
Gantt charts
8
Network charts PERT example
9
Project planning - Monitoring and control

• Monitor time, cost and quality
• Communications
• Team members report at end of each task
• Team members report at regular intervals
• Structured walk throughs
• Corrective action
• Software metrics measurements that quantify
  system development

10
Standards and Quality assurance

• What is quality ?
• Fit for purpose
• Easy to use
• Reliable
• Does what it was designed to do
• Flexible
• Easily maintainable

11
Standards and Quality assurance

• Quality Standards
• ISO 9001 quality standard for software
• Capability Maturity Model (CMM)
• Measures management of process improvement
• Special cases safety critical systems
• Nuclear power plants
• Hospital patients
• Flight control

12
Legal and Professional concerns

• Legal considerations
• Data Protection Act (1984, amended 1998)
• Regulates personal information stored and
  processed on computers
• Computer Misuse Act (1990)
• Deals with unauthorized access and modification
  of computer programs and data
• The Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act (2000)
• Regulates access to and surveillance of
  electronic communication

13
Data Protection Act 1998

• enshrines eight data protection principles in UK
  law
• personal information (living individual) must be
  
• processed fairly and lawfully
• processed only for specified purpose(s)
• adequate, relevant and not excessive
• accurate and kept up to date
• kept no longer than necessary
• available to data subjects
• processed in such a way to prevent breaches of
  the principles
• secure systems
• transferred only to white-list countries

14
Data Protection Act 1998

• gives data subjects rights
• subject access requests
• places obligations on data controllers
• covers personal data held in both computerised
  and non-computerised files
• is enforced by the OIC and the courts

15
Computer Misuse Act 1990

• A person is guilty of an offence if
• 1. He/she causes a computer to perform any
  function with intent to secure access to any
  program or data held in any computer
• the access he intends to secure is unauthorised
  and
• he/she knows at the time when he causes the
  computer to perform the function that this is the
  case
• 2. The intent a person has to have to commit an
  offence under this section need not be directed
  at
• any particular program or data
• a program or data of any particular kind or
• a program or data in any particular computer

16
Computer Misuse Act 1990

• This Section can be summarised by stating that it
  is an offence to gain unauthorised access to a
  computer system. This includes causing a computer
  to perform a function with intent to secure
  access to any program or data, knowing that the
  access is unauthorised. Note that this is an
  offence regardless of whether the motives for
  access were well-meaning or malicious. Access to
  any program or data held in a computer system is
  a wide definition and includes altering/erasing
  the program or data, copying it, moving it, using
  it and having it output from the computer in
  which it is held.
• Examples of such offences could include
  unauthorised use of another persons username and
  password, persistently trying to guess a username
  and password, and laying a trap to obtain a
  password or password file

17
Computer Misuse Act 1990

• 3. It is an offence to cause unauthorised
  modification of computer material.
• The Act defines that a person found guilty of
  this offence shall be liable on conviction to a
  maximum prison sentence of five years or an
  unlimited fine or both.
• Examples of offences under this section would be
  deleting another users files, modifying system
  files, introduction of viruses, or deliberately
  generating information to cause a complete system
  malfunction.

18
Ethics

• Ethics is the field of study that is concerned
  with questions of moral value
• Ethics are used to define the standards, moral
  values, rules, principles, etc., which govern
  human interaction
• Is it RIGHT or WRONG?
• Is it GOOD or BAD?
• Is it NECESSARY?
• Is it ACCEPTABLE?

19
Ethics

• Ethics is an essential part of the BCS Code of
  Conduct (BCS membership)
• "You are working on a web site for a client and
  have nearly finished. Your boss asks you to send
  it to the client now. 'Don't wait to test it,
  just send it to them as it is, otherwise they are
  likely to cancel the contract we can fix it
  later if there are problems.
• "You are told to go out to a client to
  demonstrate a web site which they intend buying.
  You know there are some problems with it. What do
  you show them?"

20
Summary

• Make best use of available resources to achieve
  the best possible quality
• Project managers must be involved in managing
  matters involving
• Technical resources
• Human resources
• Scheduling
• Monitoring
• Professional software developers need to be aware
  of legal and professional issues relating to
  their work

21
References

• Websites
• http//www.acm.org/ (ACM) Association for
  Computer Machinery
• http//www.ieee.org/ (IEEE) Institute of
  Electrical and Electronic Engineers
• http//www.bcs.org.uk/ (BCS) British Computer
  Society
• http//www.iee.org/ (IEE) Institution of
  Electrical Engineers
• Books
• Britton Doake, Software System Development a
  gentle introduction,
• 3e, McGraw Hill,2003, ISBN 0077099745