Page 122 - DCAP304_DCAP515_SOFTWARE_PROJECT_MANAGEMENT

Software Project Management

Notes take care in generating the WBS—if the tasks are incorrect, they can waste time going down a
wrong path.
Once the WBS is created, the team must create an estimate of the effort required to perform each
task. The most accurate estimates are those that rely on prior experience. Team members should
review previous project results and find how long similar tasks in previous projects took to
complete. Sources of delays in the past should be taken into account when making current
estimates. Postmortem reports are a good source of this information.

No estimate is guaranteed to be accurate. People get sick or leave the organization; teams run
into unforeseen technical problems; the needs of the organization change. The unexpected will
almost certainly happen. Therefore, the goal of estimation is not to predict the future. Instead, it
is to gauge an honest, well-informed opinion of the effort required to do a task from those
people in the organization who have the most applicable training and knowledge.
If two people widely disagree on how long a task will take, it’s likely that the source of that
disagreement is that each person made different assumptions about details of the work product
or the strategy for producing it. In other words, any disagreement is generally about what is
required to perform the task itself, not about the effort required to complete it. For example,
given the same vision and scope document for a tool that sets the computer clock, two different
developers might come up with wildly different estimates. But it might turn out that one
developer assumed that the implementation would have a simple command line interface,
while the other assumed that there would be a complete user interface that had to integrate
tightly with the operating system’s control panel. By helping the programmers discuss these
assumptions and come to a temporary resolution about their differences, the project manager
can help them agree on a single estimate for the task.
A project manager can help the team create more accurate estimates by reducing the uncertainty
about the project. The most effective way to do this is to do a thorough job creating a vision and
scope document —the more accurate and detailed it is, the more information the team has to
work with when generating their estimate. The project manager can also ensure that the team
has reached a consensus on the tasks that must be performed. Finally, the project manager can
lead the team in a discussion of assumptions.

Did u know? What is the QA task?
1. Retrieving, Reviewing and analyzing QI data.
2. Identifying barriers and root causes of QI issues and performance gaps.
3. Writes, revises, and verifies quality standards and test procedures for program
design and product evaluation to attain quality of software economically and
efficiently.

4. Reviews new or modified program, including documentation, diagram, and flow
chart, to determine if program will perform according to user request and conform
to guidelines.

5. Participating in committees as needed.
6. Collecting and producing written documentation for reporting findings.

Assumptions Make Estimates More Accurate

Once the team has agreed upon a WBS, they can begin to discuss each task so they can come up
with an estimate. At the outset of the project, the team members do not have all of the information

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