Ch. 23: Project Planning Flashcards
What is project planning?
Breaking down work into parts and assign them to team members.
What is a project plan?
Used to communicate how the work will be done to the project team and customers and to help assess progress on the project
When is the project plan created?
At the start of the project
What are the planning stages?
- Proposal stage
- Project startup phase
What happens in the proposal stage?
You bid for a contract to develop or provide a software system
What happens in the project startup stage?
Plan who will work on the project
How the project will be brown down into increments
How resources will be allocate
What does project pricing involve?
- Estimating how much the software will cost to develop
- Taking factors such as staff costs, hardware costs, software costs, etc into acount
What document is created during the project startup planning phase and what is in it?
Startup Plan
Is the basis for project resource allocation, defines project monitoring mechanisms
What is software pricing?
Estimates the cost to the developer of producing a software system
Takes into account hardware, software, travel, training, and effort costs
What are the factors affecting software pricing?
- Contractual terms
- Cost estimate uncertainty
- Financial health
- Market opportunity
- Requirements volatility
What are the pricing strategies?
- Under Pricing:
Company underprices a system to gain a contract - Increased Pricing:
Price may be increased when buyer wishes fixed price contract, seller increases price to allow for unexpected risks
What is plan driven development?
An approach to software engineering where the development process is planned in detail
What document is made in plan driven development and what is in it??
Project Plan
Records the work to be down, who will do it, the development schedule and the work products
What are the arguments in favor of plan driven development?
Early planning allows organizational issues to be closely taken into account before the project starts
What are the arguments against plan driven development?
Many early decisions have to be revised because of changes in the environment which the software is developed and used
What are the sections in the project plan?
- Introduction
- Project organization
- Risk analysis
- Hardware & Software resource requirements
- Work breakdown
- Project Schedule
- Monitoring and reporting mechanisms
What are the project plan supplements?
- Configuration management plan
- Deployment plan
- Maintenance plan
- Quality plan
- Validation plan
What is the configuration management plan?
Describes the configuration management procedures and structures to be used
What is the deployment plan?
Describes how the software and associated hardware will be deployed in the customer’s environment
What is the maintenance plan?
Predicts the maintenance requirements, costs, and effort
What is the quality plan?
Describes the quality procedures and standards that will be used in a project
What is the validation plan?
Describes the approach, resources, and schedule used for system validation
What are the project scheduling activities?
- Split project into tasks and estimate time and resources required to complete each task.
- Organize tasks concurrently to make optimal
use of workforce. - Minimize task dependencies to avoid delays
caused by one task waiting for another to complete. - Dependent on project managers intuition and experience.
What are the scheduling problems?
- Estimating the difficulty of problems
- Productivity isn’t proportional to the number of people working on a task
- Adding people to a late project
- The unexpected always happens. Always allow contingency in planning
