Generative AI for Software Project Management: Insights from a Review of Software Practitioner Literature
This provides insights for software practitioners on adopting generative AI responsibly, but it is incremental as it synthesizes existing discussions without new empirical results.
The paper reviewed 47 practitioner sources to understand how generative AI is perceived in software project management, finding it is seen as an assistant for automating tasks and improving practices, with concerns about hallucinations and ethics.
Software practitioners are discussing GenAI transformations in software project management openly and widely. To understand the state of affairs, we performed a grey literature review using 47 publicly available practitioner sources including blogs, articles, and industry reports. We found that software project managers primarily perceive GenAI as an "assistant", "copilot", or "friend" rather than as a "PM replacement", with support of GenAI in automating routine tasks, predictive analytics, communication and collaboration, and in agile practices leading to project success. Practitioners emphasize responsible GenAI usage given concerns such as hallucinations, ethics and privacy, and lack of emotional intelligence and human judgment. We present upskilling requirements for software project managers in the GenAI era mapped to the Project Management Institute's talent triangle. We share key recommendations for both practitioners and researchers.