Software Engineering - Old Questions

4. What do you mean by project management? Explain the project planning and project scheduling with example.

Software Project Management (SPM) is a proper way of planning and leading software projects. It is a part of project management in which software projects are planned, implemented, monitored and controlled. Project management focuses on developing a product that will have a positive effect on an organization. Without project management, a software development team may begin working on a project without any clear vision or guidance, resulting in more frequent errors and confusion. Part of project management involves making everyone involved aware of the purpose of the project and what steps are required to meet the end goal. 

Project Planning

Project planning is an organized and integrated management process, which focus on activities required for successful completion of the project. It is concerned with identifying the activities, milestones and deliverables produced by the project. Project plan should include cost of various resources required to accomplish project.

Types of project plan:

1. Quality plan: It describes the quality procedures and standards that will be used in a project

2. Validation plan: It describes the approach, resources and schedule used for system validation

3. Configuration management plan:  It describes the configuration management procedures and structures to be used.

4. Maintenance plan: It predicts the maintenance requirements of the system, maintenance costs and effort required.

5. Staff development plan:  It describes how the skills and experience of the project team members will be developed.

Project Scheduling

Project scheduling involves separating the total work involved in a project into separate activities and judging the time required to complete these activities. In the project scheduling process project managers estimate the time and resources required to complete activities and organize them into a coherent sequence. Usually, some of activities can be carried out in parallel. Managers have to coordinate these parallel activities and organize the work so that the labour is used optimally.

Fig: Project scheduling process

Project schedules are usually represented as a set of charts showing the work breakdown, activities dependencies and staff allocations. Bar charts (for example Gantt chart) and activity networks are graphical notations that are used to illustrate the project schedule. Bar charts show who is responsible for each activity and when the activity is scheduled to begin and end. Activity networks show the dependencies between the different activities.