Deliverable 1:  Software Project Plan

Due February 9, 2001

The Software Project Plan provides an overview of the work that you expect to conduct. The plan outline below is modeled after the project plan outlined in your text on page 77. The various components of the project plan are discussed in chapter 4 of your text. Your plan should include discussion of each of the first seven numbered headings below and information for headings 8 and 9 as appropriate. 

0.      Cover Sheet

·        Project title

·        Deliverable number and title

·        Date

·        Group members

·        Signatures of group members

1.      Introduction

·        Describe the significance of the project?  (What problem are you solving and who cares?)

·        What are the project goals?

·        What major functions will the software provide?

·        What technological tools will be exploited?

·        Will the software impose constraints upon

·        the computing platform,

·        the operating system,

·        the choice of programming language(s), or

·        the computing platform’s peripherals?

 

2.      Project Organization

·        How is the development team organized?

·        People involved, and their roles.

 

3.      Risk Analysis

·        Identify potential weaknesses in your project plan.

·        For each weakness, what is the likelihood that the weakness will become an actual point of vulnerability?

·        Describe strategies that you will use in the event that any of these points of vulnerability occur.

4.      Resource Requirements: Hardware, Software, and People

·        People (Indicate both the people who are directly involved in the project and those who may be external resources)

·        Hardware (What hardware resources will be required for the software development task?  How will the hardware resource requirements for the runtime environment differ from those of the development environment?)

·        Software  (What software is required to conduct the software development?  What will be required to run the software being developed?)

·        Data  (What data are needed?  Are data available for test and validation?  If so, from whom?  If not, how will they be acquired?)

5.      Work breakdown

·        What are the major tasks to be performed?

·        Develop a work break down that indicates who will be responsible for each task?

·        What are the milestones and deliverables associated with each task ?

 

6.      Project Schedule

·        Describe how the tasks relate to each other.  In particular, how will the results of early tasks be used subsequently?

·        Estimate the time required to reach each milestone.

·        Draw a time-line chart depicting the tasks, milestones, and allocation of people to tasks.

 

7.      Monitoring and reporting

·        Develop a plan for recording your activity on the project.

·        Develop instruments for logging time on the project.

·        Who will maintain these records?

·        When and what kind of reports will be produced.

8.      References

·        Identify resources that are cited.

·        Include web-based resources as well as software (shareware) as appropriate.

9.      Appendices

·        Include any supporting materials that are not appropriately referenced elsewhere.

·        Peer evaluations by each member of every other member of the group on a 10-point scale, with 10 being the highest score. Include a summary score of the performance of each group member.

 

Deliverables are due on the dates shown by 3:00 pm. Late penalties of 20% per day late, including weekends, will be assessed. The peer evaluation summary score and the score earned by your deliverable will be used to determine a score for each team member. Thus, if the deliverable earned a score of 90/100, and a team member had a summary rating of 9, that team member would receive an individual score of 0.9*90 = 81 for that deliverable.

 

Each of the deliverables 1,2,3, and 4 carries 16% of the project credit, that is, it is worth 16% of 50 = 8 points out of 100. The last deliverable carries 36% of the project credit, and is therefore worth the remaining18 points.

 

For your planning purposes, here are the tentative due dates for other deliverables: