�Software Project Management�(SPM)�

Unit-III Syllabus

• Workflows of the process: Software process workflows, Iteration workflows.
• Check points of the process: Major milestones, Minor Milestones, Periodic status assessments.
• Iterative Process Planning: Work break down structures, planning guidelines, cost and schedule estimating, Iteration planning process, Pragmatic planning.

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Workflows of the process

Software Process Workflows

• The term Workflows is used to mean a thread of cohesive and mostly sequential activities. Workflows are mapped to product artifacts. There are seven top-level workflows:
• Management workflow: controlling the process and ensuring win conditions for all stakeholders
• Environment workflow: automating the process and evolving the maintenance environment
• Requirements workflow: analyzing the problem space and evolving the requirements artifacts
• Design workflow: modeling the solution and evolving the architecture and design artifacts
• Implementation workflow: programming the components and evolving the implementation and deployment artifacts
• Assessment workflow: assessing the trends in process and product quality
• Deployment workflow: transitioning the end products to the user

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Figure 8-1 illustrates the relative levels of effort expected across the phases in each of the top-level workflows.�

Table 8-1 shows the allocation of artifacts and the emphasis of each workflow in each of the life-cycle phases of inception, elaboration, construction, and transition.�

Iteration Workflows

• Iteration consists of a loosely sequential set of activities in various proportions, depending on where the iteration is located in the development cycle.
• Each iteration is defined in terms of a set of allocated usage scenarios. An individual iteration's workflow, illustrated in Figure 8-2, generally includes the following sequence:
• Management: iteration planning to determine the content of the release and develop the detailed plan for the iteration; assignment of work packages, or tasks, to the development team
• Environment: evolving the software change order database to reflect all new baselines and changes to existing baselines for all product, test, and environment components

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Iteration Workflows

• Requirements: analyzing the baseline plan, the baseline architecture, and the baseline requirements set artifacts to fully elaborate the use cases to be demonstrated at the end of this iteration and their evaluation criteria.
• Design: evolving the baseline architecture and the baseline design set artifacts to elaborate fully the design model and test model components necessary to demonstrate against the evaluation criteria allocated to this iteration.
• Implementation: developing or acquiring any new components, and enhancing or modifying any existing components, to demonstrate the evaluation criteria allocated to this iteration.

Iteration Workflows

• Assessment: evaluating the results of the iteration, including compliance with the allocated evaluation criteria and the quality of the current baselines. assessing results to improve the basis of the subsequent iteration's plan.
• Deployment: transitioning the release either to an external organization (such as a user, independent verification and validation contractor, or regulatory agency) or to internal closure by conducting a post-mortem so that lessons learned can be captured and reflected in the next iteration.

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Iteration Workflows

• Iterations in the inception and elaboration phases focus on management, requirements, and design activities. Iterations in the construction phase focus on design, implementation, and assessment. Iterations in the transition phase focus on assessment and deployment.
• Figure 8-3 shows the emphasis on different activities across the life cycle. An iteration represents the state of the overall architecture and the complete deliverable system.
• An increment represents the current progress that will be combined with the preceding iteration to from the next iteration.

Checkpoints of the process�

Checkpoints of the process

• It is always important to have visible milestones in the life cycle where various stakeholders meet, face to face, to discuss progress and plans.
• The purpose of these events is not only to demonstrate how well a project is performing but also to achieve the following:
• Synchronize stakeholder expectations and achieve concurrence on three evolving perspectives: the requirements, the design, and the plan
• Synchronize related artifacts into a consistent and balanced state
• Identify the important risks,issues, and out-of-tolerance conditions
• Perform a global assessment for the whole life cycle, not just the current situation of an individual perspective.

Checkpoints of the process

• Three types of joint management reviews are conducted throughout the process:
1. Major milestones. These system wide events are held at the end of each development phase. They provide visibility to system wide issues, synchronize the management and engineering perspectives, and verify that the aims of the phase have been achieved.
2. Minor milestones. These iteration-focused events are conducted to review the content of an iteration in detail and to authorize continued work.
3. Status assessments. These periodic events provide management with frequent and regular insight into the progress being made.

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Checkpoints of the process

• Each of the four phases-inception, elaboration, construction, and transition consists of one or more iterations and concludes with a major milestone when a planned technical capability is produced in demonstrable form.
• An iteration represents a cycle of activities for which there is a well-defined intermediate result-a minor milestone-captured with two artifacts: a release specification (the evaluation criteria and plan) and a release description (the results).
• Major milestones at the end of each phase use formal, stakeholder-approved evaluation criteria and release descriptions; minor milestones use informal, development-team-controlled versions of these artifacts.

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Figure 9-1 illustrates a typical sequence of project checkpoints for a relatively large project.

Major Milestones

• The four major milestones occur at the transition points between life-cycle phases. They can be used in many different process models, including the conventional waterfall model.
• In an iterative model, the major milestones are used to achieve concurrence among all stakeholders on the current state of the project.
• Different stakeholders have very different concerns:
• Customers: schedule and budget estimates, feasibility, risk assessment, requirements understanding, progress, product line compatibility
• Users: consistency with requirements and usage scenarios, potential for accommodating growth, quality attributes

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Major Milestones

• Architects and systems engineers: product line compatibility, requirements changes, trade-off analyses, completeness and consistency, balance among risk, quality, and usability
• Developers: sufficiency of requirements detail and usage scenario descriptions, frameworks for component selection or development, resolution of development risk, product line compatibility, sufficiency of the development environment
• Maintainers: sufficiency of product and documentation artifacts, understandability, interoperability with existing systems, sufficiency of maintenance environment
• Others: possibly many other perspectives by stakeholders such as regulatory agencies, independent verification and validation contractors, venture capital investors, subcontractors, associate contractors, and sales and marketing teams

Table 9-1 summarizes the balance of information across the major milestones.

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Major Milestones

Life-Cycle Objectives Milestone

• The life-cycle objectives milestone occurs at the end of the inception phase.
• The goal is to present to all stakeholders a recommendation on how to proceed with development, including a plan, estimated cost and schedule, and expected benefits and cost savings.
• A successfully completed life-cycle objectives milestone will result in authorization from all stakeholders to proceed with the elaboration phase.

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Major Milestones

Life-Cycle Architecture Milestone

• The life-cycle architecture milestone occurs at the end of the elaboration phase. The primary goal is to demonstrate an executable architecture to all stakeholders.
• The baseline architecture consists of both a human- readable representation (the architecture document) and a configuration-controlled set of software components captured in the engineering artifacts.
• A successfully completed life-cycle architecture milestone will result in authorization from the stakeholders to proceed with the construction phase.

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The technical data listed in Figure 9-2 should have been reviewed by the time of the lifecycle architecture milestone.

Figure 9-3 provides default agendas for this milestone.�

Major Milestones

Initial Operational Capability Milestone

• The initial operational capability milestone occurs late in the construction phase.
• The goals are to assess the readiness of the software to begin the transition into customer/user sites and to authorize the start of acceptance testing.
• Acceptance testing can be done incrementally across multiple iterations or can be completed entirely during the transition phase is not necessarily the completion of the construction phase.

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Major Milestones

Product Release Milestone

• The product release milestone occurs at the end of the transition phase. The goal is to assess the completion of the software and its transition to the support organization, if any.
• The results of acceptance testing are reviewed, and all open issues are addressed.
• Software quality metrics are reviewed to determine whether quality is sufficient for transition to the support organization.

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Minor Milestones

• For most iterations, which have a one-month to six-month duration, only two minor milestones are needed: the iteration readiness review and the iteration assessment review.
• Iteration Readiness Review. This informal milestone is conducted at the start of each iteration to review the detailed iteration plan and the evaluation criteria that have been allocated to this iteration.
• Iteration Assessment Review. This informal milestone is conducted at the end of each iteration to assess the degree to which the iteration achieved its objectives and satisfied its evaluation criteria, to review iteration results, to review qualification test results (if part of the iteration), to determine the amount of rework to be done, and to review the impact of the iteration results on the plan for subsequent iterations.

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Figure 9-4 identifies the various minor milestones to be considered when a project is being planned.�

Periodic Status Assessments

• Periodic status assessments are management reviews conducted at regular intervals (monthly, quarterly) to address progress and quality indicators, ensure continuous attention to project dynamics, and maintain open communications among all stakeholders.
• Periodic Status assessments provide the following:
• A mechanism for openly addressing, communicating, and resolving management issues, technical issues, and project risks
• Objective data derived directly from on-going activities and evolving product configurations
• A mechanism for disseminating process, progress, quality trends, practices, and experience information to and from all stakeholders in an open forum

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The default content of periodic status assessments should include the topics identified in Table 9-2.

Iterative process planning�

Work Breakdown Structures

• A good work breakdown structure and its synchronization with the process framework are critical factors in software project success.
• Development of a work breakdown structure dependent on the project management style, organizational culture, customer preference, financial constraints, and several other hard-to-define, project-specific parameters.
• A WBS is simply a hierarchy of elements that decomposes the project plan into the discrete work tasks.

Work Breakdown Structures

• WBS provides the following information structure:
• A delineation of all significant work
• A clear task decomposition for assignment of responsibilities
• A framework for scheduling, budgeting, and expenditure tracking
• Many parameters can drive the decomposition of work into discrete tasks: product subsystems, components, functions, organizational units, life-cycle phases, even geographies. Most systems have a first-level decomposition by subsystem. Subsystems are then decomposed into their components, one of which is typically the software.

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Conventional WBS Issues

• Conventional work breakdown structures frequently suffer from three fundamental flaws.
• They are prematurely structured around the product design.
• They are prematurely decomposed, planned, and budgeted in either too much or too little detail.
• They are project-specific, and cross-project comparisons are usually difficult or impossible.
• Conventional work breakdown structures are prematurely structured around the product design. Figure 10-1 shows a typical conventional WBS that has been structured primarily around the subsystems of its product architecture, then further decomposed into the components of each subsystem.

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Evolutionary Work Breakdown Structures

• An evolutionary WBS should organize the planning elements around the process framework rather than the product framework.
• The basic recommendation for the WBS is to organize the hierarchy as follows:
• First-level WBS elements are the workflows (management, environment, requirements, design, implementation, assessment, and deployment).
• Second-level elements are defined for each phase of the life cycle (inception, elaboration, construction, and transition).
• Third-level elements are defined for the focus of activities that produce the artifacts of each phase.

A default WBS consistent with the process framework (phases, workflows, and artifacts) is shown in Figure 10-2.

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Planning Guidelines

• Software projects span a broad range of application domains. It is valuable but risky to make specific planning recommendations independent of project context.
• There is the risk that the guidelines may pe adopted blindly without being adapted to specific project circumstances. Two simple planning guidelines should be considered when a project plan is being initiated or assessed.
• The first guideline, detailed in Table 10-1, prescribes a default allocation of costs among the first-level WBS elements.
• The second guideline, detailed in Table 10-2, prescribes the allocation of effort and schedule across the lifecycle phases.

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The Cost And Schedule Estimating Process

• Project plans need to be derived from two perspectives. The first is a forward-looking, top-down approach.
• It starts with an understanding of the general requirements and constraints, derives a macro-level budget and schedule, then decomposes these elements into lower level budgets and intermediate milestones.
• From this perspective, the following planning sequence would occur:
• The software project manager (and others) develops a characterization of the overall size, process, environment, people, and quality required for the project.
• A macro-level estimate of the total effort and schedule is developed using a software cost estimation model.

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The Cost And Schedule Estimating Process

• The software project manager partitions the estimate for the effort into a top-level WBS using guidelines such as those in Table 10-1.
• At this point, subproject managers are given the responsibility for decomposing each of the WBS elements into lower levels using their top-level allocation, staffing profile, and major milestone dates as constraints.
2. The second perspective is a backward-looking, bottom-up approach. We start with the end in mind, analyze the micro-level budgets and schedules, then sum all these elements into the higher level budgets and intermediate milestones.

The Cost And Schedule Estimating Process

• This approach tends to define and populate the WBS from the lowest levels upward. From this perspective, the following planning sequence would occur:
• The lowest level WBS elements are elaborated into detailed tasks
• Estimates are combined and integrated into higher level budgets and milestones.
• Comparisons are made with the top-down budgets and schedule milestones.
• These two planning approaches should be used together, in balance, throughout the life cycle of the project.
• Figure 10-4 illustrates this life- cycle planning balance.

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The Iteration Planning Process

• Iteration is used to mean a complete synchronization across the project, with a well-orchestrated global assessment of the entire project baseline.
• Inception iterations. The early prototyping activities integrate the foundation components of a candidate architecture and provide an executable framework for elaborating the critical use cases of the system.
• Elaboration iterations. These iterations result in architecture, including a complete framework and infrastructure for execution. Upon completion of the architecture iteration, a few critical use cases should be demonstrable: (1) initializing the architecture,(2) injecting a scenario to drive the worst-case data processing flow through the system and (3) injecting a scenario to drive the worst-case control flow through the system.

The Iteration Planning Process

• Construction iterations. Most projects require at least two major construction iterations: an alpha release and a beta release.
• Transition iterations. Most projects use a single iteration to transition a beta release into the final product.
• The general guideline is that most projects will use between four and nine iterations. The typical project would have the following six-iteration profile:
• One iteration in inception: an architecture prototype
• Two iterations in elaboration: architecture prototype and architecture baseline
• Two iterations in construction: alpha and beta releases
• One iteration in transition: product release

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Pragmatic Planning

• The art of good project· management is to make trade-offs in the current iteration plan and the next iteration plan based on objective results in the current iteration and previous iterations.
• The success of every successful project can be attributed in part to good planning.
• A project's plan is a definition of how the project requirements will be transformed into' a product within the business constraints.
• It must be realistic, it must be current, it must be a team product, it must be understood by the stakeholders, and it must be used.
• Good, open plans can shape cultures and encourage teamwork.

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