A 4-Layered Plan-Driven Model (4LPdM) to Improve Software Development

Abstract

Quality is the degree of excellence of a product and one of the most important factors of software projects that mainly defines user satisfaction and success of the project. Software methodologies represent a variety of tasks, processes, and roles to manage time, cost, and quality. The invention, innovation, and diffusion for technological advancement creates challenges of software projects, thus several existing methodologies albeit with limited scope. A software product is highly influenced by the latest technology and distributed project management opportunities. Management issues are introduced for a virtual project management environment when resource persons are in another corner of the world. To resolve the problem, this research presents a new software project management model (4-LPdM) with alternative actions and practices to effectively manage. The model was presented to 20 different organizations and 29 respondents gave feedback who had experience between 1-16 years in multiple sections of software engineering. The model is evaluated based on the factors of advanced PMBOK 4.0 (scope, cost, quality, resource, risk, plan) and two (management, sustainability) additional features according to the demand of experts. This research illustrates statistical analyses to examine the significance of the proposed model besides a comprehensive comparative study of the traditional methodology.