Software Engineering Management

Software engineering management applies the principles of management to the planning, execution, and control of software projects. It spans the full lifecycle of a project: from defining its scope and feasibility, through planning and executing, to evaluating performance and closing the project in a controlled way. The dominant failure mode is not technical: it is committing to a plan without understanding the scope, and executing without measuring progress against it.

Three ideas drive everything below:

1. Measurement drives management. You cannot control what you cannot measure. The Goal-Question-Metric (GQM) paradigm provides the discipline for choosing metrics that answer real management questions rather than metrics that are easy to collect. Measuring lines of code when the management question is "will we be late?" is not measurement — it is data collection without intent. Every metric must trace to a goal and through an answerable question.