UNIVERSITY OF TECHNOLOGY, JAMAICA

COURSE NAME: SOFTWARE REQUIREMENTS DEFINITION (SRD)

INTRODUCTION TO SOFTWARE ENGINEERING (SE I)
LECTURER NAME: Dwight Thomas / Richard Pyne / Caroline Parkes
TITLE (UNIT 3): Project Planning
READING: Software Engineering, Ian Summerville Chapter 4
Kendall and Kendall Chapter 3

Project Planning
Effective management of a software project depends on thoroughly planning the
progress of the project. The project manager must anticipate problems which
might arise and prepare tentative solutions to those problems. A plan drawn up at
the start of the project should be used as the driving force behind the project. The
initial plan evolves as added information is received.

The Project Plan

The project plan sets out the resources available to the project, the work breakdown
and a schedule for carrying out the work. Project plans usually includes the following:
• Introduction – This briefly describes the objectives of the project and set out the
constraints affecting the project management
• Project Organization – This describes the way in which the development team
is organized, the people involved and their roles.
• Risk Analysis – This describes possible project risks and strategies to overcome
them. (RMMM)
• Hardware and Software Requirements – This describes the hardware and
software required to carry out development. If hardware is to be bought, then estimates
of the prices and delivery schedule should be included.
• Work breakdown – This describes the breakdown of the project into activities
and identifies the milestones (end point of a software process activity) and deliverables
(a project result that is delivered to the customer) associated with each activity.
• Project schedule – This describes the dependencies between activities, the
estimated time required to reach each milestone and the allocation of people to the
various activities.
• Monitoring and Reporting mechanisms – This describes the management
reports that should be produced, when these should be produced and the project
monitoring mechanism used.

Project Scheduling
The systems analyst’s first decision is to separate the total work involved in a project
into separate sequential activities and judge the time required to complete these
activities.

Page 1 of 4
Gantt Chart
A Gantt chart is an easy way to schedule tasks. It is a chart on which bars represent
each task or activities. The length of each bar represents the relative length of the task.
Precedence is not indicated in Gantt charts so it is not possible to tell whether an
activity is scheduled to start first.

Advantages of Gantt chart

- Its simplicity
- Allows for worthwhile communication with end users
- The bars representing activities are drawn to scale, therefore it is easy to see the
time spans

L
K
J
I
H
G
F
E
D
C
B
A
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17

Example of a Gantt chart

(Designed from the work breakdown below)

PERT Diagrams
Program Evaluation and Review Techniques (PERT) is represented by a network of
nodes and arrows that are evaluated to determine the critical activities. The schedule is
improved if necessary and the progress reviewed once the project is undertaken. Useful
when activities are done in parallel rather than in sequence. The activities represented
as bar in a Gantt chart are represented as arrows in the PERT diagram. The length of
the arrows have no direct relationship with the activity durations. Circle on the PERT are
called events and can be identified by numbers, letters, or any other arbitrary form of
designation. The circular nodes are present to:

Page 2 of 4
 a) Recognize that an activity is completed and
b) Indicate which activities need to be completed before a new activity may be
undertaken

DESCRIPTION EXPECTED
MUST TIME
TASK FOLLOW (WEEKS)
Identification of problems, opportunities, and A - 2
Objectives
Sampling and investigating hard data B A 3
Interviewing decision makers C B 2
Designing questionnaires D B 1
Administering questionnaires E D 2
Analyzing questionnaires F E 1
Observing the decision makers’ behaviour
and office environment G A 2
Perform intermediate review of elicitations H C, F, G 1
Drawing UML diagrams I H 2
Drawing ACD diagram J H 1
Developing prototypes K H 4
Review requirements specification L I, J, K 2

C 2
3
I
B
1 2 1 2 1 2
2
D E F H J L
A
2 4

G K

(Show how to work out the paths and determine the critical path.)

Page 3 of 4
To find the length of the project, each path from beginning to end is identified and the
length of each path is calculated. The longest path is referred to as the critical path and
is defined as the path that will cause the whole project to fall behind if even one day’s
delay is encountered on it. The leeway to fall behind on non-critical paths is called slack
time.

Advantage of PERT Diagrams

- Easy identification of the order of precedence
- Easy identification of the critical path and thus critical activities
- Easy determination of slack time

Drawing the PERT diagram

- Determine activities requiring no predecessor
- Determine activities requires which predecessor
- Determine the duration for each activity
- Connect nodes according to predecessors

Page 4 of 4