4.2 Management activities such as proposal writing, project planning and
personnel
selection require a set of skills including presentation and communication
skills,
organisational skills and the ability to communicate with other project team
members. Programming skills are distinct from these (indeed, it is a common
criticism of programmers that they lack human communication skills) so it
does not
follow that good programmers can re-orient their abilities to be good managers.
4.3 Project planning can only be based on available information. At the beginning
of a
project, there are many uncertainties in the available information and some
information about the project and the product may not be available. As the
project
develops, more and more information becomes available and uncertainties are
resolved. The project plan therefore must be reviewed and updated regularly
to reflect
this changing information environment.
4.4 Sections in a software project plan include
| Section Name | Description |
| Introduction | Objectives of the project, constraints which affect the project |
| Project Organization | Describe the development team organization, and the roles of the individual players |
| Risk analysis | Project risks |
| Hardware and software resource requirements | Identify H/W and S/W required to carry out the development tasks. |
| Work Breakdown | Breakdown of project into activities and identify the milestones and deliverables associated with each activity |
| Project Schedule | Describes the dependencies between activities, the estimated time required to reach each milestone, and the allocation of resources (people) to activities |
| Monitoring and reporting mechanisms | Manangement reports required |
4.5 A milestone is an end-point of a software process activity a deliverable is a project result that is delivered to the customer.
4.9 Other possible risks are:
Technology: Communications network saturates before expected transaction limit
is
reached.
People: Level of skill of available people is lower than expected.
Organisational: Organisational changes mean that the project schedule is accelerated.
Tools: CASE tools cannot handle the volume of data available for large systems.
Requirements: New non-functional requirements are introduced that require
changes to
the system arhcitecture.
Estimation: The difficult of the software is underestimated.