Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
4.2.1 Deadlines
Effective project planning revolves around the establishment of efficient, yet
attainable deadlines. These deadlines, like the milestones discussed earlier, allow
a project to be broken down into a series of related activities. These activities can
then be managed individually, as modular components of the larger software
project. In addition, deadlines also allow project managers and clients to evaluate
the efficiency of the development team. If activities are being completed after their
intended deadline, a project's feasibility and release date can be reevaluated by the
client. On the other hand, if activities are being completed ahead of time, the
project's overall timeline can be adjusted for more efficient time management.
Successfully setting and meeting deadlines requires effective project manage-
ment by the software engineering firm. To this end, project managers must be
familiar with the requirements of the project, the abilities of the development team,
and the expectations of the client. They must then be able to combine this
information into well understood and properly organized sets of activities and
deadlines. Finally, effective project managers must be able to properly manage the
development team in an efficient manner in order to reach the predefined.
4.2.2 Work Breakdown Structures
As we have stated, effective project and time management are based on the
decomposition of a software project into smaller, more manageable activities, each
with individual goals and deadlines. Of course, these activities can, if needed, be
broken down further into smaller and more manageable work units. At its top
level, it can be difficult to understand how a specific function benefits the final goal
of a piece of software. For this reason, the decomposition process can be repeated
if necessary, to create a modular software project consisting of useful, manageable
units of work with well understood goals. The units can then be planned out
individually, and resources can be dedicated in a manner that makes sense to
everyone involved (Ghezzi et al. 1991 ).
A common engineering practice, known as a Work Breakdown Structure
(WBS), can achieve this decomposition by organizing the development process in
a tree-like, activity-based format. In a fashion related to the concepts of abstraction
and generalization, a WBS provides a view of the development activities in which
some activity is described at a certain level of specificity. It is then decomposed
into constituent activities that branch off to the next highest level of specificity.
These activities can again be broken down, as described in the previous paragraph,
into even more specific activities. The result is a tree model in which the most
general activity being described, or the root node, sits at the base of the diagram,
and is expanded upon by more specific nodes on various higher levels. In the case
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