Problems and Prospects

This chapter has proved to be very popular (in the earlier editions, at least).

Problems with projects - some web links

UK survey of project managers 2003 on whether projects are completed on time and within budget:

http://www.computerweekly.com/articles/article.asp?liArticleID=126138&liArticleTypeID=20&liCategoryID=2&liChannelID=105&liFlavourID=1&sSearch=&nPage=1

A Standish Group report on the difficulties of cost estimating:

http://www.costxpert.com/resource_center/articles/tsunamireport.pdf

A quiz

I think that in looking at this topic you can draw on the experience that students have already gained from doing programming. So, for example, they know that if they spend longer on testing then the software will be more reliable, but it will cost more.

One way of drawing on their experiences and perceptions is to use a quiz. 

I think the most useful of the exercises is number 6, which asks the student to assess (for each of a number of cases) the important goals. I've used this with a class (of up to about 30) as follows:

1. ask students to think about the cases individually for about 20 minutes.
2. have a whole group discussion of the answers with someone (the lecturer) out the front writing up the conclusions on a whiteboard. Invite contributions from the whole class. Use voting occasionally, to assess the opinions of the whole class- e.g. "how many people think x is the most important goal for case y?"

Reliability

Here is some additional exercises on reliability