Learning Software Project Management From Analyzing Q&A’s in the Stack Exchange

Abstract

Software Project Management (SPM) is considered the key driver for the success or failure of software projects. Project failure is caused by various factors, the most important of which is poor SPM. Thus, we investigated the needs of practitioners by focusing on Project Management Q&A communities. More precisely, we targeted Stack Exchange to identify the primary needs of software project managers. More than 5000 SPM questions were analyzed from the conceptual model given by the Project Management Body of Knowledge PMBOK. For pre-training of the Machine Learning classifiers, we implemented Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers (BERT) and Doc2Vec text embedding and compared their performance. Our results showed that BERT outperforms Doc2Vec for pre-training in almost all scenarios. Schedule management, followed by resource management, are the main PMBOK knowledge areas of concern for project managers. Among the process groups, the emphasis of the questions is on planning. We compared the findings with the learning and training status quo in 11 top Canadian universities. We analyzed 46 SPM-related courses and found that the rank correlation of PMBOK knowledge areas is 0.23 between the key content of the analyzed courses and the focus of Q&A’s knowledge areas analyzed from Stack Exchange.