Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
Chapter
5
Software Testing
Project Plan
Any project should have four distinct parts: strategy, planning, execution, and
reporting. Essentially at project strategy you will be evaluating your strengths and
ways to find the best use of resources at your disposal against the set of require-
ments and tasks you are supposed to accomplish for the project.
In today's business world, outsourcing is a fact of life, especially so in the case of
software development. Outsourced software projects are inherently different from
in-house software projects. Accordingly project planning for these outsourced proj-
ects is also different. Offshoring adds another twist to already complex goings-on in
these projects. Priorities for different stakeholders also get changed. To win contracts
the outsourcing service providers have to come up with mature and proven project
processes, technical expertise, domain expertise, and a proven track record.
During presales efforts the outsourcing service provider gets some input about the
project from the customer and makes an initial assessment about effort estimation
and an initial project plan. Once the project is bagged, then a detailed project plan is
made for the project. In this topic we will not discuss the project planning done at the
presales level. We will concentrate only on the project planning done after the project
is bagged and a detailed project plan is then done for the entire project.
Basically project strategy and effort estimation are done at a higher level. Once
you have completed these tasks, you can move forward to detailed level planning,
providing minute details about skills matching, actual resource allocation, actual
tool selection, exact methodology to be deployed for kinds of testing to be per-
formed, framework to be created for automation, and so on. These activities are
done when you do your project planning.
..
