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Chapter 3: The planning process - Coggle Diagram
Chapter 3: The planning process
Why make plans?
Planning is serious business. It defines commitments and supports business decisions.
If the individual plans are poorly done, they will provide a poor foundation for the overall project.
Engineers must thus consider costs and schedules. The connection between cost, schedule, and the planning process
Well-thought-out plans provide leverage. They help you to make commitments you can meet and to accurately track and report your progress.
What is a plan?
Plans typically are used as
A basis for agreeing on the cost and schedule for a job
An organizing structure for doing the work
A framework for obtaining the required resources
A record of what was initially committed
With a plan, you can negotiate with people and convince some of them to give your needs priority over their other existing commitments
Provides
A definition of each major task
An estimate of the time and resources required
Framework for management review and control.
Contents of a software plan
Several things are clear when you examine the plan in the context of the questions from customers and yoy
The plan must be based on doing a defined piece of work.
The work should involve multiple steps that are clearly defined and measurable. This provides a framework for your plan and a basis for tracking your progress.
You will often want some way to check the plan with the user before you start work. .
You will need to make periodic progress statements to your customers..
PSP plans have two users
You and you need four general things from a plan
Job status: How do you know where you are? Are you going to finish on time and are the costs under control?
Job sizing: How big is this job, and how long do you expect it to take?
Job structure: How are you going to do the work? What will you do first, second, and so on?
Assessment: How good was your plan? Did you make any obvious errors, what mistakes should you avoid in the future, and how can you do a better job next time?
Customers and also they also want four general things from your plan
Is there some way to monitor progress? Will they have early warning of cost, schedule, or quality problems?
What is the commitment? Specifically, what is to be delivered. when, and at what cost?
How good is this product likely to be? Is it what they wanted? Is the right work planned to assure that the product fits their needs?
Will they be able to later evaluate how well the job was done? Can they separate the problems caused by poor planning from those caused by poor management?
Planning a software project
The steps helps to build aeffective estimating process
Start with an explicit statement of the work to be done and check to ensure that it is what your customer expects
For projects that take more than a few days' work, break them into multiple smaller tasks and estimate each task separately.
Base your estimates on comparing this job with the historical data on your prior work.
Record your estimates and later compare them with your actual results.
Use planning tools
PERT planning systems
PERT planning tools are thus helpful when you are deciding how to do the work.
PERT is a critical-path scheduling system for analyzing a job that contains multiple, interdependent tasks.
PERT systems analyze all the project data and identify the arrangement of the tasks that will produce the shortest over-all schedule.
If any of these tasks takes longer than planned, the total project schedule is delayed.
PERT planning tools can be extremely helpful in making and updating software development plans.
Cost models
Produce standardized planning projections based on their built-in historical data.
They spread labor hours over project phases and provide projected dates for standard project milestones.
The designers of these cost models analyzed the data on a family of historical projects and produced a series of factors to relate resources to estimated product size.
The planning framework
Tasks to perform
Define the requirements
Produce the conceptual design.
Estimate the product size
Produce the schedule
Develop the product
Estimate the resources
Producing a quality plan
What constitutes a good plan? How do your plans measure up and what can you do to improve your planning skills?
Is it complete?
Here is where your defined process can be most helpful.
Do you have a form that specifies what is needed?
Is it filled out?
Is it accessible?
To be accessible, a plan must be where you can find it, it must be in the proper format, and it must not be cluttered with extraneous material.
Is it clear?
If the entries on the forms are not unmistakably clear, they cannot be used with confidence. If they cannot be used with confidence, there is no point in entering them at all.
Is it specific?
What will be done, when, by whom, and at what costs.
Is it precise?
To determine an appropriate level of precision, consider the error introduced by a difference of one in the smallest unit of measure.
Precision is a matter of relating the unit of measure to the total magnitude of the measurement.
Is it accurate?