Page 64 - DCAP304_DCAP515_SOFTWARE_PROJECT_MANAGEMENT

Software Project Management

Notes plan adequately any forthcoming activities. As far as estimation and prediction is concerned
there is still a number of unsolved problems and errors. To obtain good results it is necessary to
take into consideration any previous projects. Estimating the effort with a high grade of
dependability is a problem which has not yet been solved and even the project manager has to
deal with it since the beginning.

Example: The estimation of the effort invested in the development of software projects
can turn into a complicated problem to be solved if the appropriate models are not available.
Unfortunately, until this moment this is the situation, since there are not the necessary records
in the software development companies. Years of investigation are required in order to obtain
the volumes of information needed to carry out a prediction with a good level of reliability and
with a low error margin.
The domains are not the most suitable, due to their size and limited number of variables, and
because of the fact that they depend on the particular casuistry of each company. The quality of
the prediction can improve if more appropriate sets of data are available and more deep study
of the methods is performed.
Sets of data are provided bellow. Each set shows information about certain amount of software
development projects. For each project, there are two variables: one, (independent variable) that
refers to the size of the generated code -measured in lines of code or function points-, and the
other (dependant variable) that indicates the effort (time) invested in the development of projects.
Columns “Size” and “Effort” show the measure used. Column “Projects” shows the number of
projects in the data.

Data Projects Size Effort
Set 1 21 function points person-days
Set 3 18 thousands of lines of code man-months
Set 4 33 lines of code man-months
Set 6 35 lines of code person-hours
Set 11 33 function points man-months

Effort Estimation is briefly explained in Unit-6.

2.6 Risk Identification

Risk identification is utilized in risk management to answer the questions: What can happen?
How can it happen? Risk identification is the process of distinguishing the opportunities opened
up by each activity or phase of the project and clarifying where the risk lies. The agreed lenience
of risk should help identify the amount of time should be spent in identifying risk, but, at least
the 20% of the risks that would have 80% of the potential impact should be identified. There are
many techniques to aid in risk identification and they generally fall under the heading of either
quantitative or qualitative risk identification techniques.

2.6.1 Qualitative Risk Identification Techniques

Following are the major qualitative techniques of Risk Identification:
 Assumptions Analysis

 Check Lists

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