Software project management: learning from our mistakes

Resumen

In the January/February 2014 issue of IEEE Software, the Voice of Evidence column published an article titled ?Looking for the Holy Grail of Software Development?. In that article, the authors reviewed the main practices that software project managers needed to engage in to make success more likely. While it is important to know what software project managers should do, a complementary question is, What should they not do? In other words, what practices should software project managers avoid to make success more likely? Answering this question might assist current and future software project managers in preventing, or at least mitigating, problematic scenarios that, if unresolved, will eventually lead to additional project failures. In the words of Laplante et al ?While it is certainly useful to study the successful ways people solve problems, the old adage that we learn from our mistakes suggests that studying failures might be even more fruitful.?