You have been asked to lead a software development team to build a system fulfilling the Statement of Need specified in project 1. Your team is employed by a small company. The customer wants a project that balances reasonable development cost, timely delivery, software quality, and functionality.
In this project, you will develop the TOOL for planning, managing and controlling all your software development efforts on the B&B project. Note that typically this is the first document that you produce not the last as we do in class. But we had to produce the other documents first to develop an appreciation of what a project plan entails and requires.
Completing this project will require that you produce a software project plan (SPP) document for the system. An SPP must also develop project reporting and team communication mechanisms.
SPP Templates
Please develop your SPP using the IEEE Standard for Software Project Management Plans, standard 1058-1998, posted in the Reserved Readings section on the Class Menu. Read page 4 of the standard to review the outline. Follow the outline in Figure 1 but omit the following SECTIONS from your SPP: 1.1.4 (budget summary), 1.2, 5.1, 5.2.4, 5.3, 5.5, 6.3, 6.4, all of 7, all of 8, Annexes.
The assignment
Complete the template as best as you can. Pay special attention to the bulletized points below. Make any reasonable assumptions based on your understanding of the problem that allow you to address as many sections of the SPP template as possible. (Please read the “project descriptions” in the project description SECTION of the syllabus for additional context and information on course projects).
Pay special attention to the following. The bulk of your grade will be decided on how well you address these issues.
Project schedule (Timeline): Develop a schedule for the entire project.
Project task set: Perform a work break down schedule
Risk Management: Assess and rank the project and technical risks on the project. Explain the risk mitigation steps for these identified risks
Software Configuration Management: Revise and reference your software quality assurance and software configuration management (SCM) procedures from project 3.
Hints and suggestions
Project schedule (Timeline): Use the Waterfall or Gantt Chart format but you may choose another format if it communicates equivalent information.
Activities/tasks: Organize these according to the software development tasks of; analysis, design, code, and test. Decompose these high-level tasks into at least one additional lower-level sub-task, e.g.,
Design Task
Module and Interface Design Sub-task
Data Design Sub-task
Project risks (section 5.4): Identify the risks that will jeopardize the successful completion of the project. You must quantify and rank risks based on their severity. You do this by estimating the risks cost to the project, typically in dollars, and the probability that the risk will occur, an estimate between 0 and 1. Use the example in the Module Commentary to COMPUTE a “weighted” risk which can be used to compare risks for criticality. For the most critical risk, propose a mitigation strategy, in other words, how to avoid or minimize the consequences if the risk were to occur.
Software development process (section 6.1): specify one for your project, i.e., Linear-Sequential (Waterfall) or one of the concurrent/iterative processes. Which process you choose should be reflected in our Project Schedule.
Project Duration: Information in the Problem Statement has been given for the purpose of computing project duration and effort. Use these to compute project duration and effort. Project duration should be consistent with the time-line of your Schedule. Knowing project duration and effort permits the computation of staff size, i.e., the number of software engineers required (divide effort by duration to yield staff size). I want to see the computation for effort and staff size in the relevant template Section (section 5.2.3).
