Software Project Management Fallacies

Software project management plays a critical role in software projects. Therefore, software project management actions have an important impact on software projects and organizations. However, software engineers often become software project managers with little or no training in project management. As a result, sometimes they have to rely on hearsay or their own assumptions to formulate strategies and a plan of action for managing software projects. This has led to several software project management misconceptions or fallacies that can have important negative effects on software projects. This paper examines some relevant fallacies based, on the authors' experience and discusses published material which refutes them. This work contributes to the practice of Software Project Management by identifying and correcting practices which can reduce the success rate of software projects.