The project manager

The software engineering process, the path to building quality software, starts and ends with the project manager (PM). Project managers are sometimes referred to as product managers depending on the company. Generally, these terms can be used interchangeably. This chapter will use the title of PM. PMs get the project started, oversee its progress, and determine when it’s complete. PMs are an integral part of any software team because of their technical, communication, and organizational skills. They’ll typically have an active role in all the steps in the software engineering life cycle and may spend a lot of their time in one stage instead of others. For example, they may spend a lot of time defining requirements and understanding stakeholder needs in the planning stage, or they may spend some time meeting with key engineers during the implementation stage to get an idea of how long a particular task may take. The key goals of a PM are to determine...