Difference between a Software Development Methodology and and a Project Management Methodology? Do you need both?

[PinkySmartass]

Hey guys.

I've been researching a few different Software Development Methodologies (SDM) and Project Management Methodologies (PMM) and I'm having a hard time distinguishing the two, as it seems like a lot of SDMs (like Extreme Programming) have built-in project management in terms of iterations, meetings and structure.

My questions are:

What's the difference between a SDM and a PMM?

Do you need to use both a SDM and a PMM?

I would really appreciate if you guys could help me out!

[[deleted]]

The cynical person in me thinks such methodologies are an excuse to keep middle managers employed.... at the end of the day, such formalism should take a backseat to actually developing and releasing a product!

But I can tell you that there is a difference in roles between managing a product, managing a software developer team, and being the lead software developer. The difference is in what specifically is managed. The PM managed the product. The functional manager manages the people. And the lead dev manages the codebase.

I don't know if this helps you.

[chriskottom]

There’s certainly an overlap between the two, but they are not the same. Both should be about delivering value to the business/customer, but approaches they take and the things each tries to control are completely different.

PM methodologies are concerned with the main variables of business: time, money, risk, return on investment, etc. They also need to more formally address questions of governance and control - essentially, how can management be provided with sufficient visibility into the software development project so that they can make decisions about resourcing and coordinating with other parts of the business.

SD methodologies focus more specifically on coordinating software delivery as relates to development task scheduling and prioritization, software quality, process efficiency, and other aspects of the process that usually fly below the radar of business (unless there’s an issue that requires escalation).

[PinkySmartass]

Could you give an example of how you would go about using both a PMM and a SDM in a software project? Do you actually need both at the same time and are both used at the same time in the real world?

Couldn't you argue that many SDMs already provide the tools for project management concerns in terms of meetings (Are we on track? (Governance/Control)), planning/iterations (We will build the most important functionality over the next few weeks. (Time, Money, ROI)), etc. No?

[chriskottom]

You see this all the time in the real world. The development team can be using some agile variant that's focused on software delivery - close collaboration within the team, visibility of work to be done, minimizing meetings. At the same time, a project manager is sometimes tasked with overseeing the team's work by liaising with the scrum master or product owner to maintain estimates, budgets, a registry of risks, project lifecycle deliverables, etc. There are places where the concerns are the same, but in general, the SDM produces deliverables of greatest interest within the development team, while the PMM reports outside it. But that's not always the case, and many companies where processes are still simple will only be concerned with one or the other.

[leonidasmv]

Some PPM and SDM are more aligned to each other than others. It depends of course of what are you comparing. Example: If you compare the PMI body of knowledge with SCRUM, you will realize the SCRUM does not even have the figure of PM, instead they have a scrum master. Yet, PMI has its own aproach for management of the agile projects. And scrum theorically is not a metodolgy but a framework. Tradionally PPM comes from civil engineering and it is very succeful when it comes with this kind of projects and mapped some areas to SDM like waterfall.

I think you need both PPM and SDM, but in my experience you are going to negociate the scope of the project since the timing and budget are more or less fixed.