project planning process in software engineering

project planning process in software engineering

project planning process:

Project planning starts at the initial stage, after getting the "go ahead" from the customer. The "go ahead" con is in the form of a letter of intent, purchase order, work order, or any such formal document. This document authorizes the vendor organization, which is engaged in developing applications, to start executing the project as per the terms and conditions of the order. This is the starting point for project planning. The vendor organization management appoints a project manager who is responsible for executing the project successfully.

A software project has two aspects one aspect dealing with software engineering, , which is used to develop the application, and the other aspect that manages this software engineering lifecycle. Each aspect is important as the lack of good and stable engineering lifestyle will not

sful result in good quality output, and the lack of good project management will result in the execution of the projects even with good technically sound project team. The project management assumes importance as an effective project management practice will help in getting the resources aligned toward the goals and objectives of the project, resulting in harmony of resources, optimum utilization of the resources, and meeting the customer needs. It was as a thread that binds different software engineering processes in one direction. Each software engineering process has procedures, activities, and is assigned to team members. These processes could have dependency on each other and tasks contained in them may require many resources Project management antes y or a monitor these processes and achieves the desired results,

Project planning stage also includes looking at the terms and conditions mentioned in the purchase order and setting project goals and objectives accordingly. In order to achieve the contractual obligations, the project has to set goals and objectives that are either similar to or stringent than that mentioned in the purchase order. The contract mentions the specification limits and the project management sets acceptable limits, where acceptable limits are more stringent than specified limits. On the basis of these specified limits and the software engineering processes involved, a project plan is prepared. The project plan involves defining a lifecycle that needs to be followed in the project, doing activities and tasks at a granular level for each of these processes, and estimating effort required for each of these granular levels of task. Apart from engineering activities, the plan also includes activities such as milestone review, quality audit, training, configuration management, peer review, and risk management,

The project manager also identifies all the stakeholders for the project and calls for a meeting, In this including, known usually as "Kick off" meeting, the manages shares all the relevant objectives of the project and asks for a commitment from them. Issues related to hardware, software, personnel recruitment, technical architecture, and so forth are discussed in detail. The project manager, being appointed as the sole person to be accountable for project execution, reports to the management regarding the outcome of the "kick-off" meeting, In case there is a gap between objectives and commitment from stakeholders, the same is apprised by the project manager to the management for suitable action

For any project to succeed, it is essential to identify all the stakeholders and make an explicit effort to understand what the different stakeholders need in order to have a "win-win situation for all stakeholders. In order to achieve det it is necessary to call for a kick-off meeting well in advance (as mentioned in Chapter 1), discuss the objectives of the project with them, and find out whether or not there are any conflicting internet. Alle that it is the responsibility of the project manager to negotiate and remove any conflict among the stakeholders so as to achieve cohesiveness among them.

Identifying Stakeholders

Stakeholders are not always the persons reflected in the official organization hierarchy, or people who have a direct connection to the project. Some of the typical stakeholders could be the information system department of customers' managers of the team, end-users of the application from a customer the organization, team that is going to maintain the application, later on, project team members, visa department for visa application, travel department for making necessary travel arrangements, HR department for recruitment, training department for providing training to team members, architect

 process definition and tailoring:

A process is defined as one where there are inputs that are converted to outputs. A process will have certain characteristics; a process can be divided into procedures, each procedure is divided into tasks. Each procedure is allocated to a role, which would be accountable for the completion of that procedure. A software project also follows a set of processes. These processes can be exclusively defined for the project or are adopted from an organization-wide process repository. An organization-wide process is defined after executing a number of projects following similar project lifecycles over a period of time. For example, the organization would have executed a number of development projects for different customers. Each project would have carried out different activities and processes. These processes are usually similar in one organization. Over weeks, months, and years of following these processes, the processes will be similar and a standard process can be defined for development projects. As a result, any new development project can follow this standard process without having to define a new one. This new standard process can be accompanied by guidelines for executing these processes. An organization-wide standard process thus describes the manner in which different activities and tasks in a project will be completed. If a new project follows this standard process and guidelines, then the performance of projects in terms of quality, delivery schedule, and time required (effort in terms of man-hours) can be very well predicted. The variations will be reduced and will definitely help the customers in having faith in the project processes. It has been observed that the customers usually feel more comfortable while dealing with vendors following a standard process.

For any organization, it is important to define standard processes and guidelines. This means an organization should have separate standard processes with guidelines for development projects as well as for maintenance and products. Standard processes help to reduce variations to the performance of different projects in different aspects such as productivity, cost of quality, schedule