Page 104 - DCAP305_PRINCIPLES_OF_SOFTWARE_ENGINEERING

Principles of Software Engineering

Notes Figure 5.4: An Example of a Gantt Chart

At the end of the day the software schedule or Gantt chart is used to allow team members to
easily see what they are doing and at what time.

An important part of the planning is the critical path. It means for identifying the critical path
you need to find the difference between the earliest date and the latest date for an event known
as the slack. This is a measure of how late an event may be without affecting the end date of the
project. Any event with a slack of zero is critical in the sense that any delay in achieving that
event will delay the completion date of the project as a whole. There will always be at least one
path through the plan joining those critical events this path is known as the Critical Path. The
significance of the critical path is two-fold:
• In managing the project we must pay particular attention to monitoring activities on the
critical path so that the effects of any delay or resource unavailability are detected and
corrected at the earliest opportunity.

• In planning the project it is the critical path that we must shorten if we are to reduce the
overall duration of the project.

Create a Gantt chart for the software project planning strategy.

5.2 Effort Estimation

A software project is urbanized through software processes in which common activities comprise
requirement, design and functioning, validation and evolution. Several of these processes have
a future-oriented character in the sense that they are concerned with planning activities and
products that have yet to be realised. A critical challenge is to create unsurprising software
processes so that the software project can be completed on time and in a gainful manner.

98 LOVELY PROFESSIONAL UNIVERSITY