IV Year B. Tech.

IT – I Sem [R18 IT]

(Professional Elective-III)
SOFTWARE PROCESS AND PROJECT MANAGEMENT
Objectives:
 Understanding the specific roles within a software organization as related to project and process
management
 Understanding the basic infrastructure competences (e.g., process modeling and measurement)
 Understanding the basic steps of project planning, project management, quality assurance, and
process management and their relationships
UNIT-I
Software Process Maturity
Software Maturity Framework, Principles of Software Process Change, Software Process Assessment,
The Initial Process, The Repeatable Process, The Defined Process, The Managed Process, The
Optimizing Process, Process Reference Models, Capability Maturity Model(CMM), CMMI, PCMM,
TSP, PSP.

UNIT-II
Software Project Management Renaissance
Conventional Software Management: The waterfall Model, Conventional Software Management
Performance
Evolution of Software Economics: software Economics. Pragmatic Software Cost Estimation.
Improving Software Economics: Reducing Software Product Size, Improving Software Processes,
Improving Team Effectiveness, Improving Automation, Achieving Required Quality, Peer Inspections.
The old way and the new: Principles of Conventional Software Engineering, Principles of Modern
Software Management, Transitioning to an interactive Process.
Life-Cycle Phases and Process Artifacts
Engineering and Production Stages, Inception, Elaboration, Construction, Transition phases, The Artifact
Sets, Management Artifacts,, Engineering Artifacts, Pragmatic Artifacts,
Model Based Software Architectures: A Management Perspective and Technical Perspective.
UNIT-III
WorkFlows and Checkpoints of the Process
Software Process Workflows, Iteration Workflows, Major Mile Stones, Minor Milestones, Periodic Status
Assessments.
Iterative Process Planning
Work Breakdown Structures, Planning Guidelines, Cost and Schedule Estimating. Iteration Planning
Process, Pragmatic Planning.

UNIT-IV
Project Organizations

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Line-of-Business Organizations, Project Organizations, Evolution of Organizations,
Process Automation: Building Blocks, the Project Environment.
Project Control and Process Instrumentation
Seven Core Metrics, Management Indicators, Quality Indicators, Life Cycle Expectations Pragmatic
Software metrics, Metrics Automation
UNIT-V
CCPDS-R Case Study and Future Software Project Management Practices, Modern Project Profiles,
Next-Generation Software Economics, Modern Process Transitions.

TEXT BOOKS:
1. Managing Software Process, Watts S Humphrey, Pearson Education.
2. Software Project Management, Walker Royce, Pearson Education.
Outcomes:
At the end of the course, the student shall be able to:
 Describe and determine the purpose and importance of project management from the perspectives
of planning, tracking and completion of project
 Compare and differentiate organization structures and project structures.
 Implement a project to manage project schedule, expenses and resource with the application of
suitable project management tools

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 UNIT – II

Conventional Software Management: The waterfall model, conventional software Management

performance. Evolution of Software Economics: Software Economics, pragmatic software cost
estimation. Improving Software Economics: Reducing Software product size, improving software
processes, improving team effectiveness, improving automation, Achieving required quality, peer
inspections. The Old Way and The New: Principles of Conventional Software Engineering, Principles
of Modern Software Management, Transitioning to an interactive Process.
Life-Cycle Phases-Engineering and Production Stages, Inception, Elaboration, Construction, Transition
phases, Artifacts of the Process-The Artifact Sets, Management Artifacts,Engineering Artifacts,
Pragmatic Artifacts, Model Based Software Architectures: A Management Perspective and Technical
Perspective.

1. CONVENTIONAL SOFTWARE MANAGEMENT

Conventional software management practices are sound in theory, but practice is still tied to archaic
(outdated) technology and techniques. The best thing about software is its flexibility: It can be
programmed to do almost anything. The worst thing about software is also its flexibility: The "almost
anything" characteristic has made it difficult to plan, monitors, and control software development.
Three important analyses of the state of the software engineering industry are
1. Software development is still highly unpredictable. Only about 10% of software projects are
delivered successfully within initial budget and schedule estimates.
2. Management has a greater effect on the success or failure of a project than technology advances.
3. The level of software scrap and rework is indicative of an immature process.
All three analyses reached the same general conclusion: The success rate for software projects is
very low. The three analyses provide a good introduction to the magnitude of the software problem
and the current norms for conventional software management performance.

1.1 THE WATERFALL MODEL

Most software engineering texts present the waterfall model as the source of the "conventional"
software process.
1.1.1 IN THEORY
It provides an insightful and concise summary of conventional software management Three
main primary points are
1. There are two essential steps common to the development of computer programs: analysis
and coding.

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 Waterfall Model part 1: The two basic steps to building a program.
2. In order to manage and control all of the intellectual freedom associated with software
development, one must introduce several other "overhead" steps, including system
requirements definition, software requirements definition, program design, and testing. These
steps supplement the analysis and coding steps. Below Figure illustrates the resulting project
profile and the basic steps in developing a large-scale program.

3. The basic framework described in the waterfall model is risky and invites failure. The testing
phase that occurs at the end of the development cycle is the first event for which timing, storage,
input/output transfers, etc., are experienced as distinguished from analyzed. The resulting design
changes are likely to be so disruptive that the software requirements upon which the design is
based are likely violated. Either the requirements must be modified or a substantial design change
is warranted.

Five necessary improvements for waterfall model are:-

1. Program design comes first. Insert a preliminary program design phase between the software
requirements generation phase and the analysis phase. By this technique, the program designer assures
that the software will not fail because of storage, timing, and data flux (continuous change). As analysis
proceeds in the succeeding phase, the program designer must impose on the analyst the storage, timing,
and operational constraints in such a way that he senses the consequences. If the total resources to be
applied are insufficient or if the embryonic (in an early stage of development) operational design is
wrong, it will be recognized at this early stage and the iteration with requirements and preliminary design
can be redone before final design, coding, and test commences. This program design procedure is
implemented in the following manner:
 Begin the design process with program designers, not analysts or programmers.
 Design, define, and allocate the data processing modes even at the risk of being wrong.
 Allocate processing functions, design the database, allocate execution time, define interfaces and
processing modes with the operating system, describe input and output processing, and define
preliminary operating procedures.

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  Write an overview document that is understandable, informative, and current so that every worker
on the project can gain an elemental understanding of the system.
2. Document the design. The amount of documentation required on most software programs is usually
more. Documentation is necessary due to the following reasons:
 Each designer must communicate with interfacing designers, managers, and possibly customers.
 During early phases, the documentation is the design.
 The real monetary value of documentation is to support later modifications by a separate test
team, a separate maintenance team, and operations personnel who are not software literate.
3. Do it twice. If a computer program is being developed for the first time, arrange matters so that the
version finally delivered to the customer for operational deployment is actually the second version insofar
as far as critical design/operations are concerned. In the first version, the team must have a special broad
competence where they can quickly sense trouble spots in the design, model them, model alternatives
and, finally, arrive at an error-free program.
4. Plan, control, and monitor testing. The biggest user of project resources-manpower, computer time,
and/or management judgment-is the test phase. This is the phase of greatest risk in terms of cost and
schedule. It occurs at the latest point in the schedule, when backup alternatives are least available, if at all.
The previous three recommendations were all aimed at uncovering and solving problems before entering
the test phase. However, even after doing these things, there is still a test phase and there are still
important things to be done, including: (1) employ a team of test specialists who were not responsible for
the original design; (2) employ visual inspections to spot the obvious errors like dropped minus signs,
missing factors of two, jumps to wrong addresses (do not use the computer to detect this kind of thing, it
is too expensive); (3) test every logic path; (4) employ the final checkout on the target computer.
5. Involve the customer. It is important to involve the customer in a formal way so that he has
committed himself at earlier points before final delivery. There are three points following requirements
definition where the insight, judgment, and commitment of the customer can bolster the development
effort. These include a "preliminary software review" following the preliminary program design step, a
sequence of "critical software design reviews" during program design, and a "final software acceptance
review".

1.1.2 IN PRACTICE
Some software projects still practice the conventional software management approach. It is useful to
summarize the characteristics of the conventional process as it has typically been applied, which is not
necessarily as it was intended. Projects destined for trouble frequently exhibit the following symptoms:
 Protracted integration and late design breakage.
 Late risk resolution.
 Requirements-driven functional decomposition.
 Adversarial (conflict or opposition) stakeholder relationships.
 Focus on documents and review meetings.
Protracted Integration and Late Design Breakage
For a typical development project that used a waterfall model management process, Figure 1-2 illustrates
development progress versus time. Progress is defined as percent coded, that is, demonstrable in its target
form.
The following sequence was common:
 Early success via paper designs and thorough (often too thorough) briefings.
 Commitment to code late in the life cycle.

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  Integration nightmares (unpleasant experience) due to unforeseen implementation issues and
interface ambiguities.
 Heavy budget and schedule pressure to get the system working.
 Late shoe-homing of no optimal fixes, with no time for redesign.
 A very fragile, unmentionable product delivered late.

In the conventional model, the entire system was designed on paper, then implemented all at once,
then integrated. Table 1-1 provides a typical profile of cost expenditures across the spectrum of software
activities.

Late risk resolution A serious issue associated with the waterfall lifecycle was the lack of early risk
resolution. Figure 1.3 illustrates a typical risk profile for conventional waterfall model projects. It
includes four distinct periods of risk exposure, where risk is defined as the probability of missing a cost,
schedule, feature, or quality goal. Early in the life cycle, as the requirements were being specified, the
actual risk exposure was highly unpredictable.

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 Requirements-Driven Functional Decomposition: This approach depends on specifying requirements
completely and unambiguously before other development activities begin. It naively treats all
requirements as equally important and depends on those requirements remaining constant over the
software development life cycle. These conditions rarely occur in the real world. Specification of
requirements is a difficult and important part of the software development process. Another property of
the conventional approach is that the requirements were typically specified in a functional manner. Built
into the classic waterfall process was the fundamental assumption that the software itself was
decomposed into functions; requirements were then allocated to the resulting components. This
decomposition was often very different from a decomposition based on object-oriented design and the use
of existing components. Figure 1-4 illustrates the result of requirements-driven approaches: a software
structure that is organized around the requirements specification structure.

Adversarial Stakeholder Relationships: The conventional process tended to result in adversarial

stakeholder relationships, in large part because of the difficulties of requirements specification and the
exchange of information solely through paper documents that captured engineering information in ad hoc
formats.
The following sequence of events was typical for most contractual software efforts:
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1. The contractor prepared a draft contract-deliverable document that captured an intermediate artifact
and delivered it to the customer for approval.
2. The customer was expected to provide comments (typically within 15 to 30 days).
3. The contractor incorporated these comments and submitted (typically within 15 to 30 days) a final
version for approval. This one-shot review process encouraged high levels of sensitivity on the part of
customers and contractors.
Focus on Documents and Review Meetings: The conventional process focused on producing various
documents that attempted to describe the software product, with insufficient focus on producing tangible
increments of the products themselves. Contractors were driven to produce literally tons of paper to meet
milestones and demonstrate progress to stakeholders, rather than spend their energy on tasks that would
reduce risk and produce quality software. Typically, presenters and the audience reviewed the simple
things that they understood rather than the complex and important issues. Most design reviews therefore
resulted in low engineering value and high cost in terms of the effort and schedule involved in their
preparation and conduct. They presented merely a facade of progress. Table 1-2 summarizes the results
of a typical design review.

1.2 CONVENTIONAL SOFTWARE MANAGEMENT PERFORMANCE

Barry Boehm's "Industrial Software Metrics Top 10 List” is a good, objective characterization of the state
of software development.
1. Finding and fixing a software problem after delivery costs 100 times more than finding and fixing the
problem in early design phases.
2. You can compress software development schedules 25% of nominal, but no more.
3. For every $1 you spend on development, you will spend $2 on maintenance.
4. Software development and maintenance costs are primarily a function of the number of source lines of
code.
5. Variations among people account for the biggest differences in software productivity.
6. The overall ratio of software to hardware costs is still growing. In 1955 it was 15:85; in 1985, 85:15.
7. Only about 15% of software development effort is devoted to programming.
8. Software systems and products typically cost 3 times as much per SLOC as individual software
programs. Software-system products (i.e., system of systems) cost 9 times as much.
9. Walkthroughs catch 60% of the errors
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10. 80% of the contribution comes from 20% of the contributors.
2. Evolution of Software Economics
2.1 SOFTWARE ECONOMICS
Most software cost models can be abstracted into a function of five basic parameters: size, process,
personnel, environment, and required quality.
1. The size of the end product (in human-generated components), which is typically quantified in terms of
the number of source instructions or the number of function points required to develop the required
functionality
2. The process used to produce the end product, in particular the ability of the process to avoid nonvalue-
adding activities (rework, bureaucratic delays, communications overhead)
3. The capabilities of software engineering personnel, and particularly their experience with the computer
science issues and the applications domain issues of the project
4. The environment, which is made up of the tools and techniques available to support efficient software
development and to automate the process
5. The required quality of the product, including its features, performance, reliability, and adaptability
The relationships among these parameters and the estimated cost can be written as follows:
Effort = (Personnel) (Environment) (Quality) ( Sizeprocess)
One important aspect of software economics (as represented within today's software cost models) is that
the relationship between effort and size exhibits a diseconomy of scale. The diseconomy of scale of
software development is a result of the process exponent being greater than 1.0. Contrary to most
manufacturing processes, the more software you build, the more expensive it is per unit item. Figure 2-1
shows three generations of basic technology advancement in tools, components, and processes. The
required levels of quality and personnel are assumed to be constant. The ordinate of the graph refers to
software unit costs (pick your favorite: per SLOC, per function point, per component) realized by an
organization. The three generations of software development are defined as follows:
1) Conventional: 1960s and 1970s, craftsmanship. Organizations used custom tools, custom processes,
and virtually all custom components built in primitive languages. Project performance was highly
predictable in that cost, schedule, and quality objectives were almost always underachieved.
2) Transition: 1980s and 1990s, software engineering. Organiz:1tions used more-repeatable processes and
offthe-shelf tools, and mostly (>70%) custom components built in higher level languages. Some of the
components (<30%) were available as commercial products, including the operating system, database
management system, networking, and graphical user interface.
3) Modern practices: 2000 and later, software production. This book's philosophy is rooted in the use
of managed and measured processes, integrated automation environments, and mostly (70%) off-the-
shelf components. Perhaps as few as 30% of the components need to be custom built Technologies for
environment automation, size reduction, and process improvement are not independent of one another. In
each new era, the key is complementary growth in all technologies. For example, the process advances
could not be used successfully without new component technologies and increased tool automation.

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Organizations are achieving better economies of scale in successive technology eras-with very large
projects (systems of systems), long-lived products, and lines of business comprising multiple similar
projects. Figure 2-2 provides an overview of how a return on investment (ROI) profile can be achieved in
subsequent efforts across life cycles of various domains.

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2.2 PRAGMATIC SOFTWARE COST ESTIMATION
One critical problem in software cost estimation is a lack of well-documented case studies of projects that
used an iterative development approach. Software industry has inconsistently defined metrics or atomic
units of measure, the data from actual projects are highly suspect in terms of consistency and
comparability. It is hard enough to collect a homogeneous set of project data within one organization; it is
extremely difficult to homogenize data across different organizations with different processes, languages,
domains, and so on. There have been many debates among developers and vendors of software cost
estimation models and tools. Three topics of these debates are of particular interest here:
1. Which cost estimation model to use?
2. Whether to measure software size in source lines of code or function points.
3. What constitutes a good estimate?
There are several popular cost estimation models (such as COCOMO, CHECKPOINT, ESTIMACS,
Knowledge Plan, Price-S, ProQMS, SEER, SLIM, SOFTCOST, and SPQR/20), CO COMO is also one of
the most open and well-documented cost estimation models. The general accuracy of conventional cost

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models (such as COCOMO) has been described as "within 20% of actuals, 70% of the time." Most real-
world use of cost models is bottom-up (substantiating a target cost) rather than top-down (estimating the
"should" cost). Figure 2-3 illustrates the predominant practice: The software project manager defines the
target cost of the software, and then manipulates the parameters and sizing until the target cost can be
justified. The rationale for the target cost maybe to win a proposal, to solicit customer funding, to attain
internal corporate funding, or to achieve some other goal. The process described in Figure 2-3 is not all
bad. In fact, it is absolutely necessary to analyze the cost risks and understand the sensitivities and trade-
offs objectively. It forces the software project manager to examine the risks associated with achieving the
target costs and to discuss this information with other stakeholders.
A good software cost estimate has the following attributes:
 It is conceived and supported by the project manager, architecture team, development team, and
test team accountable for performing the work.
 It is accepted by all stakeholders as ambitious but realizable.
 It is based on a well-defined software cost model with a credible basis.
 It is based on a database of relevant project experience that includes similar processes, similar
technologies, similar environments, similar quality requirements, and similar people.
 It is defined in enough detail so that its key risk areas are understood and the probability of
success is objectively assessed.
Extrapolating from a good estimate, an ideal estimate would be derived from a mature cost
model with an experience base that reflects multiple similar projects done by the same team with
the same mature processes and tools.

3. Improving Software Economics

Five basic parameters of the software cost model are
1.Reducing the size or complexity of what needs to be developed.
2. Improving the development process.
3. Using more-skilled personnel and better teams (not necessarily the same thing).
4. Using better environments (tools to automate the process).
5. Trading off or backing off on quality thresholds.
These parameters are given in priority order for most software domains. Table 3-1 lists some of the
technology developments, process improvement efforts, and management approaches targeted at
improving the economics of software development and integration.

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3.1 REDUCING SOFTWARE PRODUCT SIZE
The most significant way to improve affordability and return on investment (ROI) is usually to produce a
product that achieves the design goals with the minimum amount of human-generated source material.
Component-based development is introduced as the general term for reducing the "source" language size
to achieve a software solution. Reuse, object-oriented technology, automatic code production, and higher
order programming languages are all focused on achieving a given system with fewer lines of human-
specified source directives (statements). size reduction is the primary motivation behind improvements in
higher order languages (such as C++, Ada 95, Java, Visual Basic), automatic code generators (CASE
tools, visual modeling tools, GUI builders), reuse of commercial components (operating systems,
windowing environments, database management systems, middleware, networks), and object-oriented
technologies (Unified Modeling Language, visual modeling tools, architecture frameworks).

3.1.1 LANGUAGES
Universal function points (UFPs) are useful estimators for language-independent, early life-cycle
estimates. The basic units of function points are external user inputs, external outputs, internal logical
data groups, external data interfaces, and external inquiries. SLOC metrics are useful estimators for
software after a candidate solution is formulated and an implementation language is known. Substantial
data have been documented relating SLOC to function points. Some of these results are shown in Table 3-
2.

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3.1.2 OBJECT-ORIENTED METHODS AND VISUAL MODELING
Object-oriented programming languages appear to benefit both software productivity and software
quality. The fundamental impact of object-oriented technology in reducing the overall size of what needs
to be developed, is by providing more formalized notations for capturing and visualizing software
abstractions.
Booch has described 3 reasons which helps in improving software economics using an object oriented
approach:
1. An object-oriented model of the problem and its solution encourages a common vocabulary between
the end users of a system and its developers, thus creating a shared understanding of the problem being
solved.
2. The use of continuous integration creates opportunities to recognize risk early and make incremental
corrections without destabilizing the entire development effort.
3. An object-oriented architecture provides a clear separation of concerns among disparate elements of a
system, creating firewalls that prevent a change in one part of the system from rending the fabric of the
entire architecture.
Booch also summarized five characteristics of a successful object-oriented project.
1. A ruthless focus on the development of a system that provides a well understood collection of essential
minimal characteristics.
2. The existence of a culture that is centered on results, encourages communication, and yet is not afraid
to fail.
3. The effective use of object-oriented modeling.
4. The existence of a strong architectural vision.
5. The application of a well-managed iterative and incremental development life cycle.
3.1.3 REUSE
Reusing existing components and building reusable components have been natural software engineering
activities since the earliest improvements in programming languages. Reuse minimizes development costs
while achieving all the other required attributes of performance, feature set, and quality. Treat reuse as an
essential part of achieving a return on investment.
Most truly reusable components of value are transitioned to commercial products supported by
organizations with the following characteristics:
 They have an economic motivation for continued support.
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  They take ownership of improving product quality, adding new features, and transitioning to new
technologies.
 They have a sufficiently broad customer base to be profitable.
The cost of developing a reusable component is not trivial. Figure 3-1 examines the economic trade-offs.
The steep initial curve illustrates the economic obstacle to developing reusable components. Reuse is an
important discipline that has an impact on the efficiency of all workflows and the quality of most
artifacts.

3.1.4 COMMERCIAL COMPONENTS

A common approach being pursued today in many domains is to maximize integration of commercial
components and off-the-shelf products. While the use of commercial components is certainly desirable as
a means of reducing custom development, it has not proven to be straightforward in practice. Table 3-3
identifies some of the advantages and disadvantages of using commercial components.

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3.2 IMPROVING SOFTWARE PROCESSES
Process is an overloaded term. Three distinct process perspectives are.
1. Metaprocess: an organization's policies, procedures, and practices for pursuing a software-
intensive line of business. The focus of this process is on organizational economics, long-term
strategies, and software ROI.
2. Macroprocess: a project's policies, procedures, and practices for producing a complete software
product within certain cost, schedule, and quality constraints. The focus of the macro process is on
creating an adequate instance of the Meta process for a specific set of constraints.
3. Microprocess: a project team's policies, procedures, and practices for achieving an artifact of the
software process. The focus of the micro process is on achieving an intermediate product baseline
with adequate quality and adequate functionality as economically and rapidly as practical.
Although these three levels of process overlap somewhat, they have different objectives,
audiences, metrics, concerns, and time scales as shown in Table 3-4
Table 3-4: Three Levels of Process and their attributes

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 The primary focus of process improvement should be on achieving an adequate solution in minimum no.
of iteration and eliminating as much as rework and scrap possible. The quality of software process has an
impact on the required effort and also on the schedule of the development.
3.3 IMPROVING TEAM EFFECTIVENESS
Teamwork is much more important than the sum of the individuals. With software teams, a project
manager needs to configure a balance of solid talent with highly skilled people in the leverage positions.
Some maxims of team management include the following:
 A well-managed project can succeed with a nominal engineering team.
 A mismanaged project will almost never succeed, even with an expert team of engineers.
 A well-architected system can be built by a nominal team of software builders.
 A poorly architected system will struggle even with an expert team of builders.
Boehm five staffing principles are
1. The principle of top talent: Use better and fewer people
2. The principle of job matching: Fit the tasks to the skills and motivation of the people available.
3. The principle of career progression: An organization does best in the long run by helping its people to
self-actualize.
4. The principle of team balance: Select people who will complement and harmonize with one another

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5. The principle of phase-out: Keeping a misfit on the team doesn't benefit anyone
Software project managers need many leadership qualities in order to enhance team effectiveness. The
following are some crucial attributes of successful software project managers that deserve much more
attention:
Hiring skills. Few decisions are as important as hiring decisions. Placing the right person in the right job
seems obvious but is surprisingly hard to achieve.
Customer-interface skill. Avoiding adversarial relationships among stakeholders is a prerequisite for
success.
Decision-making skill. The jillion books written about management have failed to provide a clear
definition of this attribute. We all know a good leader when we run into one, and decision-making skill
seems obvious despite its intangible definition.
Team-building skill. Teamwork requires that a manager establish trust, motivate progress, exploit
eccentric prima donnas, transition average people into top performers, eliminate misfits, and consolidate
diverse opinions into a team direction.
Selling skill. Successful project managers must sell all stakeholders (including themselves) on decisions
and priorities, sell candidates on job positions, sell changes to the status quo in the face of resistance, and
sell achievements against objectives. In practice, selling requires continuous negotiation, compromise,
and empathy
3.4 IMPROVING AUTOMATION THROUGH SOFTWARE ENVIRONMENTS
The tools and environment used in the software process generally have a linear effect on the productivity
of the process. Planning tools, requirements management tools, visual modeling tools, compilers, editors,
debuggers, quality assurance analysis tools, test tools, and user interfaces provide crucial automation
support for evolving the software engineering artifacts. Above all, configuration management
environments provide the foundation for executing and instrument the process. At first order, the isolated
impact of tools and automation generally allows improvements of 20% to 40% in effort. However, tools
and environments must be viewed as the primary delivery vehicle for process automation and
improvement, so their impact can be much higher.
Automation of the design process provides payback in quality, the ability to estimate costs and
schedules, and overall productivity using a smaller team. Round-trip engineering describes the key
capability of environments that support iterative development. As we have moved into maintaining
different information repositories for the engineering artifacts, we need automation support to ensure
efficient and error-free transition of data from one artifact to another. Forward engineering is the
automation of one engineering artifact from another, more abstract representation. For example,
compilers and linkers have provided automated transition of source code into executable code. Reverse
engineering is the generation or modification of a more abstract representation from an existing artifact
(for example, creating a visual design model from a source code representation). Economic improvements
associated with tools and environments. It is common for tool vendors to make relatively accurate
individual assessments of life-cycle activities to support claims about the potential economic impact of
their tools. For example, it is easy to find statements such as the following from companies in a particular
tool
 Requirements analysis and evolution activities consume 40% of life-cycle costs.
 Software design activities have an impact on more than 50% of the resources.
 Coding and unit testing activities consume about 50% of software development effort and
schedule.
 Test activities can consume as much as 50% of a project's resources.
 Configuration control and change management are critical activities that can consume as much as
25% of resources on a large-scale project.
 Documentation activities can consume more than 30% of project engineering resources.
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  Project management, business administration, and progress assessment can consume as much as
30% of project budgets.
3.5 ACHIEVING REQUIRED QUALITY
Software best practices are derived from the development process and technologies. Table 3-5
summarizes some dimensions of quality improvement.
Key practices that improve overall software quality include the following:
 Focusing on driving requirements and critical use cases early in the life cycle, focusing on
requirements completeness and traceability late in the life cycle, and focusing throughout the life
cycle on a balance between requirements evolution, design evolution, and plan evolution.
 Using metrics and indicators to measure the progress and quality of an architecture as it evolves
from a high-level prototype into a fully compliant product
 Providing integrated life-cycle environments that support early and continuous configuration
control, change management, rigorous design methods, document automation, and regression test
automation
 Using visual modeling and higher level languages that support architectural control, abstraction,
reliable programming, reuse, and self-documentation
 Early and continuous insight into performance issues through demonstration-based evaluations

Conventional development processes stressed early sizing and timing estimates of computer program
resource utilization. However, the typical chronology of events in performance assessment was as follows
 Project inception. The proposed design was asserted to be low risk with adequate performance
margin.
 Initial design review. Optimistic assessments of adequate design margin were based mostly on
paper analysis or rough simulation of the critical threads. In most cases, the actual application
algorithms and database sizes were fairly well understood.
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  Mid-life-cycle design review. The assessments started whittling away at the margin, as early
benchmarks and initial tests began exposing the optimism inherent in earlier estimates.
 Integration and test. Serious performance problems were uncovered, necessitating fundamental
changes in the architecture. The underlying infrastructure was usually the scapegoat, but the real
culprit was immature use of the infrastructure, immature architectural solutions, or poorly
understood early design trade-offs.
3.6 PEER INSPECTIONS: A PRAGMATIC VIEW
Peer inspections are frequently over hyped as the key aspect of a quality system. In my experience, peer
reviews are valuable as secondary mechanisms, but they are rarely significant contributors to quality
compared with the following primary quality mechanisms and indicators, which should be emphasized in
the management process:
 Transitioning engineering information from one artifact set to another, thereby assessing the
consistency, feasibility, understandability, and technology constraints inherent in the engineering
artifacts
 Major milestone demonstrations that force the artifacts to be assessed against tangible criteria in
the context of relevant use cases
 Environment tools (compilers, debuggers, analyzers, automated test suites) that ensure
representation rigor, consistency, completeness, and change control
 Life-cycle testing for detailed insight into critical trade-offs, acceptance criteria, and requirements
compliance
 Change management metrics for objective insight into multiple-perspective change trends and
convergence or divergence from quality and progress goals

Inspections are also a good vehicle for holding authors accountable for quality products.
All authors of software and documentation should have their products scrutinized as a natural by-
product of the process. Therefore, the coverage of inspections should be across all authors rather
than across all components.

4. THE OLD WAY AND THE NEW

4.1 THE PRINCIPLES OF CONVENTIONAL SOFTWARE ENGINEERING

1.Make quality # 1: Quality must be quantified and mechanisms put into place to motivate its
achievement
2.High-quality software is possible: Techniques that have been demonstrated to increase quality include
involving the customer, prototyping, simplifying design, conducting inspections, and hiring the best
people
3.Give products to customers early: No matter how hard you try to learn users' needs during the
requirements phase, the most effective way to determine real needs is to give users a product and let them
play with it
4.Determine the problem before writing the requirements: When faced with what they believe is a
problem, most engineers rush to offer a solution. Before you try to solve a problem, be sure to explore all
the alternatives and don't be blinded by the obvious solution
5.Evaluate design alternatives: After the requirements are agreed upon, you must examine a variety of
architectures and algorithms. You certainly do not want to use” architecture" simply because it was used
in the requirements specification.

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6.Use an appropriate process model: Each project must select a process that makes ·the most sense for
that project on the basis of corporate culture, willingness to take risks, application area, volatility of
requirements, and the extent to which requirements are well understood.
7.Use different languages for different phases: Our industry's eternal thirst for simple solutions to
complex problems has driven many to declare that the best development method is one that uses the same
notation throughout the life cycle.
8.Minimize intellectual distance: To minimize intellectual distance, the software's structure should be
as close as possible to the real-world structure
9.Put techniques before tools: An undisciplined software engineer with a tool becomes a dangerous,
undisciplined software engineer
10.Get it right before you make it faster: It is far easier to make a working program run faster than it is
to make a fast program work. Don't worry about optimization during initial coding
11.Inspect code: Inspecting the detailed design and code is a much better way to find errors than testing
12.Good management is more important than good technology: Good management motivates people
to do their best, but there are no universal "right" styles of management.
13.People are the key to success: Highly skilled people with appropriate experience, talent, and training
are key.
14.Follow with care: Just because everybody is doing something does not make it right for you. It may
be right, but you must carefully assess its applicability to your environment.
15.Take responsibility: When a bridge collapses we ask, "What did the engineers do wrong?" Even
when software fails, we rarely ask this. The fact is that in any engineering discipline, the best methods can
be used to produce awful designs, and the most antiquated methods to produce elegant designs.
16.Understand the customer's priorities: It is possible the customer would tolerate 90% of the
functionality delivered late if they could have 10% of it on time.
17.The more they see, the more they need: The more functionality (or performance) you provide a user,
the more functionality (or performance) the user wants.
18. Plan to throw one away: One of the most important critical success factors is whether or not a
product is entirely new. Such brand-new applications, architectures, interfaces, or algorithms rarely work
the first time.
19. Design for change: The architectures, components, and specification techniques you use must
accommodate change.
20. Design without documentation is not design: I have often heard software engineers say, "I have
finished the design. All that is left is the documentation. "
21. Use tools, but be realistic: Software tools make their users more efficient.
22. Avoid tricks: Many programmers love to create programs with tricks constructs that perform a
function correctly, but in an obscure way. Show the world how smart you are by avoiding tricky code
23. Encapsulate: Information-hiding is a simple, proven concept that results in software that is easier to
test and much easier to maintain.
24. Use coupling and cohesion: Coupling and cohesion are the best ways to measure software's inherent
maintainability and adaptability
25. Use the McCabe complexity measure: Although there are many metrics available to report the
inherent complexity of software, none is as intuitive and easy to use as Tom McCabe's

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26.Don't test your own software: Software developers should never be the primary testers of their own
software.
27.Analyze causes for errors: It is far more cost-effective to reduce the effect of an error by preventing
it than it is to find and fix it. One way to do this is to analyze the causes of errors as they are detected
28.Realize that software's entropy increases: Any software system that undergoes continuous change
will grow in complexity and will become more and more disorganized
29.People and time are not interchangeable: Measuring a project solely by person-months makes little
sense
30.Expect excellence: Your employees will do much better if you have high expectations for them.

4.2 THE PRINCIPLES OF MODERN SOFTWARE MANAGEMENT

Top 10 principles of modern software management are. (The first five, which are the main themes
of my definition of an iterative process, are summarized in Figure 4-1.)
1. Base the process on an architecture-first approach. This requires that a demonstrable balance be
achieved among the driving requirements, the architecturally significant design decisions, and the
lifecycle plans before the resources are committed for full-scale development.
2. Establish an iterative life-cycle process that confronts risk early. With today's sophisticated software
systems, it is not possible to define the entire problem, design the entire solution, build the software, and
then test the end product in sequence. Instead, an iterative process that refines the problem understanding,
an effective solution, and an effective plan over several iterations encourages a balanced treatment of all
stakeholder objectives. Major risks must be addressed early to increase predictability and avoid expensive
downstream scrap and rework.
3. Transition design methods to emphasize component-based development. Moving from a line-of code
mentality to a component-based mentality is necessary to reduce the amount of human-generated source
code and custom development.
4. Establish a change management environment. The dynamics of iterative development, including
concurrent workflows by different teams working on shared artifacts, necessitates objectively controlled
baselines.

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5. Enhance change freedom through tools that support round-trip engineering. Round-trip engineering is
the environment support necessary to automate and synchronize engineering information in different
formats (such as requirements specifications, design models, source code, executable code, test cases).
6. Capture design artifacts in rigorous, model-based notation. A model-based approach (such as UML)
supports the evolution of semantically rich graphical and textual design notations.
7. Instrument the process for objective quality control and progress assessment. Life-cycle assessment of
the progress and the quality of all intermediate products must be integrated into the process.
8. Use a demonstration-based approach to assess intermediate artifacts.
9. Plan intermediate releases in groups of usage scenarios with evolving levels of detail. It is essential that
the software management process drive toward early and continuous demonstrations within the
operational context of the system, namely its use cases.
10. Establish a configurable process that is economically scalable. No single process is suitable for all
software developments.
Table 4-1 maps top 10 risks of the conventional process to the key attributes and principles of a modern
process

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4.3 TRANSITIONING TO AN ITERATIVE PROCESS
Modern software development processes have moved away from the conventional waterfall
model, in which each stage of the development process is dependent on completion of the previous stage.
The economic benefits inherent in transitioning from the conventional waterfall model to an iterative
development process are significant but difficult to quantify. As one benchmark of the expected economic
impact of process improvement, consider the process exponent parameters of the COCOMO II model.
(Appendix B provides more detail on the COCOMO model) This exponent can range from 1.01 (virtually
no diseconomy of scale) to 1.26 (significant diseconomy of scale). The parameters that govern the value
of the process exponent are application precedentedness, process flexibility, architecture risk resolution,
team cohesion, and software process maturity.
The following paragraphs map the process exponent parameters of COCOMO II to my top 10 principles
of a modern process.
 Application precedentedness. Domain experience is a critical factor in understanding how to
plan and execute a software development project. For unprecedented systems, one of the key goals
is to confront risks and establish early precedents, even if they are incomplete or experimental.
This is one of the primary reasons that the software industry has moved to an iterative life-cycle
process. Early iterations in the life cycle establish precedents from which the product, the process,
and the plans can be elaborated in evolving levels of detail.
 Process flexibility. Development of modern software is characterized by such a broad solution
space and so many interrelated concerns that there is a paramount need for continuous
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 incorporation of changes. These changes may be inherent in the problem understanding, the
solution space, or the plans. Project artifacts must be supported by efficient change management
commensurate with project needs. A configurable process that allows a common framework to be
adapted across a range of projects is necessary to achieve a software return on investment.
 Architecture risk resolution. Architecture-first development is a crucial theme underlying a
successful iterative development process. A project team develops and stabilizes architecture
before developing all the components that make up the entire suite of applications components.
An architecture-first and component-based development approach forces the infrastructure,
common mechanisms, and control mechanisms to be elaborated early in the life cycle and drives
all component make/buy decisions into the architecture process.
 Team cohesion. Successful teams are cohesive, and cohesive teams are successful. Successful
teams and cohesive teams share common objectives and priorities. Advances in technology (such
as programming languages, UML, and visual modeling) have enabled more rigorous and
understandable notations for communicating software engineering information, particularly in the
requirements and design artifacts that previously were ad hoc and based completely on paper
exchange. These model-based formats have also enabled the round-trip engineering support
needed to establish change freedom sufficient for evolving design representations.
 Software process maturity. The Software Engineering Institute's Capability Maturity Model
(CMM) is a well-accepted benchmark for software process assessment. One of key themes is that
truly mature processes are enabled through an integrated environment that provides the
appropriate level of automation to instrument the process for objective quality control.

4. LIFE CYCLE PHASES AND PROCESS ARTIFACTS

Characteristic of a successful software development process is the well-defined separation between
"research and development" activities and "production" activities. Most unsuccessful projects exhibit one
of the following characteristics:
 An overemphasis on research and development
 An overemphasis on production.
Successful modern projects-and even successful projects developed under the conventional process-
tend to have a very well-defined project milestone when there is a noticeable transition from a research
attitude to a production attitude. Earlier phases focus on achieving functionality. Later phases revolve
around achieving a product that can be shipped to a customer, with explicit attention to robustness,
performance, and finish. A modern software development process must be defined to support the
following:
 Evolution of the plans, requirements, and architecture, together with well defined synchronization
points
 Risk management and objective measures of progress and quality
 Evolution of system capabilities through demonstrations of increasing functionality

5.1 ENGINEERING AND PRODUCTION STAGES

To achieve economies of scale and higher returns on investment, we must move toward a software
manufacturing process driven by technological improvements in process automation and component-
based development. Two stages of the life cycle are:
1. The engineering stage, driven by less predictable but smaller teams doing design and synthesis
activities
2. The production stage, driven by more predictable but larger teams doing construction, test, and
deployment activities

25
 The transition between engineering and production is a crucial event for the various stakeholders. The
production plan has been agreed upon, and there is a good enough understanding of the problem and the
solution that all stakeholders can make a firm commitment to go ahead with production. Engineering
stage is decomposed into two distinct phases, inception and elaboration, and the production stage into
construction and transition. These four phases of the life-cycle process are loosely mapped to the
conceptual framework of the spiral model as shown in Figure 5-1

5.2 INCEPTION PHASE

The overriding goal of the inception phase is to achieve concurrence among stakeholders on the life-
cycle objectives for the project.
PRIMARY OBJECTIVES
 Establishing the project's software scope and boundary conditions, including an operational
concept, acceptance criteria, and a clear understanding of what is and is not intended to be in the
product
 Discriminating the critical use cases of the system and the primary scenarios of operation that will
drive the major design trade-offs
 Demonstrating at least one candidate architecture against some of the primary scenarios
26
  Estimating the cost and schedule for the entire project (including detailed estimates for the
elaboration phase)
 Estimating potential risks (sources of unpredictability)
ESSENTIAL ACTIVITIES
 Formulating the scope of the project. The information repository should be sufficient to define the
problem space and derive the acceptance criteria for the end product.
 Synthesizing the architecture. An information repository is created that is sufficient to
demonstrate the feasibility of at least one candidate architecture and an, initial baseline of
make/buy decisions so that the cost, schedule, and resource estimates can be derived.
 Planning and preparing a business case. Alternatives for risk management, staffing, iteration
plans, and cost/schedule/profitability trade-offs are evaluated.
PRIMARY EVALUATION CRITERIA
 Do all stakeholders agree on the scope definition and cost and schedule estimates?
 Are requirements understood, as evidenced by the fidelity of the critical use cases?
 Are the cost and schedule estimates, priorities, risks, and development processes credible?
 Do the depth and breadth of an architecture prototype demonstrate the preceding criteria? (The
primary value of prototyping candidate architecture is to provide a vehicle for understanding the
scope and assessing the credibility of the development group in solving the particular technical
problem.)
 Are actual resource expenditures versus planned expenditures acceptable

5.3 ELABORATION PHASE

At the end of this phase, the "engineering" is considered complete. The elaboration phase activities must
ensure that the architecture, requirements, and plans are stable enough, and the risks sufficiently
mitigated, that the cost and schedule for the completion of the development can be predicted within an
acceptable range. During the elaboration phase, an executable architecture prototype is built in one or
more iterations, depending on the scope, size, & risk.

PRIMARY OBJECTIVES
 Baselining the architecture as rapidly as practical (establishing a configuration-managed snapshot
in which all changes are rationalized, tracked, and maintained)
 Baselining the vision
 Baselining a high-fidelity plan for the construction phase
 Demonstrating that the baseline architecture will support the vision at a reasonable cost in a
reasonable time

ESSENTIAL ACTIVITIES
 Elaborating the vision.
 Elaborating the process and infrastructure.
 Elaborating the architecture and selecting components.

PRIMARY EVALUATION CRITERIA

 Is the vision stable?
 Is the architecture stable?

27
  Does the executable demonstration show that the major risk elements have been addressed and
credibly resolved?
 Is the construction phase plan of sufficient fidelity, and is it backed up with a credible basis of
estimate?
 Do all stakeholders agree that the current vision can be met if the current plan is executed to
develop the complete system in the context of the current architecture?
 Are actual resource expenditures versus planned expenditures acceptable?

5.4 CONSTRUCTION PHASE

During the construction phase, all remaining components and application features are integrated into the
application, and all features are thoroughly tested. Newly developed software is integrated where
required. The construction phase represents a production process, in which emphasis is placed on
managing resources and controlling operations to optimize costs, schedules, and quality.
PRIMARY OBJECTIVES
 Minimizing development costs by optimizing resources and avoiding unnecessary scrap and
rework
 Achieving adequate quality as rapidly as practical
 Achieving useful versions (alpha, beta, and other test releases) as rapidly as practical

ESSENTIAL ACTIVITIES
 Resource management, control, and process optimization
 Complete component development and testing against evaluation criteria
 Assessment of product releases against acceptance criteria of the vision
PRIMARY EVALUATION CRITERIA
 Is this product baseline mature enough to be deployed in the user community? (Existing defects
are not obstacles to achieving the purpose of the next release.)
 Is this product baseline stable enough to be deployed in the user community? (Pending changes
are not obstacles to achieving the purpose of the next release.)
 Are the stakeholders ready for transition to the user community?
 Are actual resource expenditures versus planned expenditures acceptable?

5.5 TRANSITION PHASE

The transition phase is entered when a baseline is mature enough to be deployed in the end-user domain.
This typically requires that a usable subset of the system has been achieved with acceptable quality levels
and user documentation so that transition to the user will provide positive results. This phase could
include any of the following activities:
1. Beta testing to validate the new system against user expectations
2. Beta testing and parallel operation relative to a legacy system it is replacing
3. Conversion of operational databases
4. Training of users and maintainers
The transition phase concludes when the deployment baseline has achieved the complete vision.
PRIMARY OBJECTIVES

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  Achieving user self-supportability
 Achieving stakeholder concurrence that deployment baselines are complete and consistent with
the evaluation criteria of the vision
 Achieving final product baselines as rapidly and cost-effectively as practical
ESSENTIAL ACTIVITIES
 Synchronization and integration of concurrent construction increments into consistent
deployment baselines
 Deployment-specific engineering (cutover, commercial packaging and production, sales rollout
kit development, field personnel training)
 Assessment of deployment baselines against the complete vision and acceptance criteria in the
requirements set
EVALUATION CRITERIA
 Is the user satisfied?
 Are actual resource expenditures versus planned expenditures acceptable?

6. ARTIFACTS OF THE PROCESS

6.1 THE ARTIFACT SETS
To make the development of a complete software system manageable, distinct collections of information
are organized into artifact sets. Artifact represents cohesive information that typically is developed and
reviewed as a single entity.
Life-cycle software artifacts are organized into five distinct sets that are roughly partitioned by the
underlying language of the set: management (ad hoc textual formats), requirements (organized text and
models of the problem space), design (models of the solution space), implementation (human-readable
programming language and associated source files), and deployment (machine-process able languages
and associated files). The artifact sets are shown in Figure 6-1.

6.1.1 THE MANAGEMENT SET

The management set captures the artifacts associated with process planning and execution. These
artifacts use ad hoc notations, including text, graphics, or whatever representation is required to capture
the "contracts" among project personnel (project management, architects, developers, testers, marketers,
administrators), among stakeholders (funding authority, user, software project manager, organization

29
manager, regulatory agency), and between project personnel and stakeholders. Specific artifacts included
in this set are the work breakdown structure (activity breakdown and financial tracking mechanism), the
business case (cost, schedule, profit expectations), the release specifications (scope, plan, objectives for
release baselines), the software development plan (project process instance), the release descriptions
(results of release baselines), the status assessments (periodic snapshots of project progress), the software
change orders (descriptions of discrete baseline changes), the deployment documents (cutover plan,
training course, sales rollout kit), and the environment (hardware and software tools, process automation,
& documentation).
Management set artifacts are evaluated, assessed, and measured through a combination of the
following:
 Relevant stakeholder review
 Analysis of changes between the current version of the artifact and previous versions
 Major milestone demonstrations of the balance among all artifacts and, in particular, the accuracy
of the business case and vision artifacts

6.1.2 THE ENGINEERING SETS

The engineering sets consist of the requirements set, the design set, the implementation set, and
the deployment set.
Requirements Set
Requirements artifacts are evaluated, assessed, and measured through a combination of the
following:
 Analysis of consistency with the release specifications of the management set
 Analysis of consistency between the vision and the requirements models
 Mapping against the design, implementation, and deployment sets to evaluate the consistency and
completeness and the semantic balance between information in the different sets
 Analysis of changes between the current version of requirements artifacts and previous versions
(scrap, rework, and defect elimination trends)
 Subjective review of other dimensions of quality

Design Set
UML notation is used to engineer the design models for the solution. The design set contains
varying levels of abstraction that represent the components of the solution space (their identities,
attributes, static relationships, dynamic interactions). The design set is evaluated, assessed, and measured
through a combination of the following:
 Analysis of the internal consistency and quality of the design model
 Analysis of consistency with the requirements models
 Translation into implementation and deployment sets and notations (for example, traceability,
source code generation, compilation, linking) to evaluate the consistency and completeness and
the semantic balance between information in the sets
 Analysis of changes between the current version of the design model and previous versions (scrap,
rework, and defect elimination trends)
 Subjective review of other dimensions of quality
Implementation set
The implementation set includes source code (programming language notations) that represents
the tangible implementations of components (their form, interface, and dependency relationships)

30
Implementation sets are human-readable formats that are evaluated, assessed, and measured through a
combination of the following:
 Analysis of consistency with the design models
 Translation into deployment set notations (for example, compilation and linking) to evaluate the
consistency and completeness among artifact sets
 Assessment of component source or executable files against relevant evaluation criteria through
inspection, analysis, demonstration, or testing
 Execution of stand-alone component test cases that automatically compare expected results with
actual results
 Analysis of changes between the current version of the implementation set and previous versions
(scrap, rework, and defect elimination trends)
 Subjective review of other dimensions of quality
Deployment Set
The deployment set includes user deliverables and machine language notations, executable
software, and the build scripts, installation scripts, and executable target specific data necessary to use the
product in its target environment. Deployment sets are evaluated, assessed, and measured through a
combination of the following:
 Testing against the usage scenarios and quality attributes defined in the requirements set to
evaluate the consistency and completeness and the~ semantic balance between information in the
two sets
 Testing the partitioning, replication, and allocation strategies in mapping components of the
implementation set to physical resources of the deployment system (platform type, number,
network topology)
 Testing against the defined usage scenarios in the user manual such as installation, user-oriented
dynamic reconfiguration, mainstream usage, and anomaly management
 Analysis of changes between the current version of the deployment set and previous versions
(defect elimination trends, performance changes)
 Subjective review of other dimensions of quality
Each artifact set is the predominant development focus of one phase of the life cycle; the
other sets take on check and balance roles.

As illustrated in Figure 6-2, each phase has a predominant focus: Requirements are the focus of
the inception phase; design, the elaboration phase; implementation, the construction phase; and

31
deployment, the transition phase. The management artifacts also evolve, but at a fairly constant level
across the life cycle. Most of today's software development tools map closely to one of the five artifact
sets.
1. Management: scheduling, workflow, defect tracking, change management,
2. documentation, spreadsheet, resource management, and presentation tools
2. Requirements: requirements management tools
3. Design: visual modeling tools
4. Implementation: compiler/debugger tools, code analysis tools, test coverage analysis tools, and
test management tools
5. Deployment: test coverage and test automation tools, network management tools, commercial
components (operating systems, GUIs, RDBMS, networks, middleware), and installation tools.

Implementation Set versus Deployment Set

The separation of the implementation set (source code) from the deployment set (executable code)
is important because there are very different concerns with each set. The structure of the information
delivered to the user (and typically the test organization) is very different from the structure of the source
code information. Engineering decisions that have an impact on the quality of the deployment set but are
relatively incomprehensible in the design and implementation sets include the following:
 Dynamically reconfigurable parameters (buffer sizes, color palettes, number of servers, number of
simultaneous clients, data files, run-time parameters)
 Effects of compiler/link optimizations (such as space optimization versus speed optimization)
 Performance under certain allocation strategies (centralized versus distributed, primary and
shadow threads, dynamic load balancing, hot backup versus checkpoint/rollback)
 Virtual machine constraints (file descriptors, garbage collection, heap size, maximum record size,
disk file rotations)
 Process-level concurrency issues (deadlock and race conditions)
 Platform-specific differences in performance or behavior

6.1.3 ARTIFACT EVOLUTION OVER THE LIFE CYCLE

Each state of development represents a certain amount of precision in the final system description. Early
in the life cycle, precision is low and the representation is generally high. Eventually, the precision of
representation is high and everything is specified in full detail. Each phase of development focuses on a
particular artifact set. At the end of each phase, the overall system state will have progressed on all sets,
as illustrated in Figure 6-3.

32
 The inception phase focuses mainly on critical requirements usually with a secondary focus on an initial
deployment view. During the elaboration phase, there is much greater depth in requirements, much more
breadth in the design set, and further work on implementation and deployment issues. The main focus of
the construction phase is design and implementation. The main focus of the transition phase is on
achieving consistency and completeness of the deployment set in the context of the other sets.
6.1.4 TEST ARTIFACTS
Conventional software testing followed the same document-driven approach that was applied to software
development. Development teams build requirement documents, top level design documents and detailed
design documents before constructing any source file. Similarly test team builds test plan document,
system test procedure document, integration test plan document, unit test plan document, etc.
 The test artifacts must be developed concurrently with the product from inception through
deployment. Thus, testing is a full-life-cycle activity, not a late life-cycle activity.
 The test artifacts are communicated, engineered, and developed within the same artifact sets as the
developed product.
 The test artifacts are implemented in programmable and repeatable formats (as software
programs).
 The test artifacts are documented in the same way that the product is documented.
 Developers of the test artifacts use the same tools, techniques, and training as the software
engineers developing the product.
Test artifact subsets are highly project-specific, the following example clarifies the relationship
between test artifacts and the other artifact sets. Consider a project to perform seismic data processing for
the purpose of oil exploration. This system has three fundamental subsystems: (1) a sensor subsystem that
captures raw seismic data in real time and delivers these data to (2) a technical operations subsystem that
converts raw data into an organized database and manages queries to this database from (3) a display
subsystem that allows workstation operators to examine seismic data in human-readable form. Such a
system would result in the following test artifacts:
 Management set. The release specifications and release descriptions capture the objectives,
evaluation criteria, and results of an intermediate milestone. These artifacts are the test plans and
test results negotiated among internal project teams. The software change orders capture test
results (defects, testability changes, requirements ambiguities, enhancements) and the closure
criteria associated with making a discrete change to a baseline.
 Requirements set. The system-level use cases capture the operational concept for the system and
the acceptance test case descriptions, including the expected behaviour of the system and its
quality attributes. The entire requirement set is a test artifact because it is the basis of all
assessment activities across the life cycle.
 Design set. A test model for non-deliverable components needed to test the product baselines is
captured in the design set. These components include such design set artifacts as a seismic event
simulation for creating realistic sensor data; a "virtual operator" that can support unattended,
afterhours test cases; specific instrumentation suites for early demonstration of resource usage;
transaction rates or response times; and use case test drivers and component stand-alone test
drivers.
 Implementation set. Self-documenting source code representations for test components and test
drivers provide the equivalent of test procedures and test scripts. These source files may also
include human-readable data files representing certain statically defined data sets that are explicit
test source files. Output files from test drivers provide the equivalent of test reports.
 Deployment set. Executable versions of test components, test drivers, and data files are provided.

6.2 MANAGEMENT ARTIFACTS

33
 The management set includes several artifacts that capture intermediate results and ancillary information
necessary to document the product/process legacy, maintain the product, improve the product, and
improve the process.

Work Breakdown Structure

Work breakdown structure (WBS) is the vehicle for budgeting and collecting costs. To monitor and
control a project's financial performance, the software project man1ger must have insight into project
costs and how they are expended. The structure of cost accountability is a serious project planning
constraint.
Business Case
The business case artifact provides all the information necessary to determine whether the project is
worth investing in. It details the expected revenue, expected cost, technical and management plans, and
backup data necessary to demonstrate the risks and realism of the plans. The main purpose is to transform
the vision into economic terms so that an organization can make an accurate ROI assessment. The
financial forecasts are evolutionary, updated with more accurate forecasts as the life cycle progresses.
Figure 6-4 provides a default outline for a business case.

Release Specifications
The scope, plan, and objective evaluation criteria for each baseline release are derived from the vision
statement as well as many other sources (make/buy analyses, risk management concerns, architectural
considerations, shots in the dark, implementation constraints, quality thresholds). These artifacts are
intended to evolve along with the process, achieving greater fidelity as the life cycle progresses and
requirements understanding matures. Figure 6-5 provides a default outline for a release specification

Software Development Plan

34
 The software development plan (SDP) elaborates the process framework into a fully detailed plan. Two
indications of a useful SDP are periodic updating (it is not stagnant shelfware) and understanding and
acceptance by managers and practitioners alike. Figure 6-6 provides a default outline for a software
development plan.

Release Descriptions
Release description documents describe the results of each release, including performance against each of
the evaluation criteria in the corresponding release specification. Release baselines should be
accompanied by a release description document that describes the evaluation criteria for that
configuration baseline and provides substantiation (through demonstration, testing, inspection, or
analysis) that each criterion has been addressed in an acceptable manner. Figure 6-7 provides a default
outline for a release description.

Status Assessments
Status assessments provide periodic snapshots of project health and status, including the software project
manager's risk assessment, quality indicators, and management indicators. Typical status assessments
should include a review of resources, personnel staffing, financial data (cost and revenue), top 10 risks,
35
technical progress (metrics snapshots), major milestone plans and results, total project or product scope &
action items
Environment
An important emphasis of a modern approach is to define the development and maintenance environment
as a first-class artifact of the process. A robust, integrated development environment must support
automation of the development process. This environment should include requirements management,
visual modeling, document automation, host and target programming tools, automated regression testing,
and continuous and integrated change management, and feature and defect tracking.

Deployment
A deployment document can take many forms. Depending on the project, it could include several
document subsets for transitioning the product into operational status. In big contractual efforts in which
the system is delivered to a separate maintenance organization, deployment artifacts may include
computer system operations manuals, software installation manuals, plans and procedures for cutover
(from a legacy system), site surveys, and so forth. For commercial software products, deployment
artifacts may include marketing plans, sales rollout kits, and training courses.

Management Artifact Sequences

In each phase of the life cycle, new artifacts are produced and previously developed artifacts are updated
to incorporate lessons learned and to capture further depth and breadth of the solution. Figure 6-8
identifies a typical sequence of artifacts across the life-cycle phases.

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6.3 ENGINEERING ARTIFACTS
Most of the engineering artifacts are captured in rigorous engineering notations such as UML,
programming languages, or executable machine codes. Three engineering artifacts are explicitly intended
for more general review, and they deserve further elaboration.
Vision Document
The vision document provides a complete vision for the software system under development and.
supports the contract between the funding authority and the development organization. A project vision is
meant to be changeable as understanding evolves of the requirements, architecture, plans, and technology.
A good vision document should change slowly. Figure 6-9 provides a default outline for a vision
document.

37
Architecture Description
The architecture description provides an organized view of the software architecture under development.
It is extracted largely from the design model and includes views of the design, implementation, and
deployment sets sufficient to understand how the operational concept of the requirements set will be
achieved. The breadth of the architecture description will vary from project to project depending on many
factors. Figure 6-10 provides a default outline for an architecture description.

Software User Manual

The software user manual provides the user with the reference documentation necessary to support the
delivered software. Although content is highly variable across application domains, the user manual
should include installation procedures, usage procedures and guidance, operational constraints, and a user
interface description, at a minimum. For software products with a user interface, this manual should be
developed early in the life cycle because it is a necessary mechanism for communicating and stabilizing
an important subset of requirements. The user manual should be written by members of the test team, who
are more likely to understand the user's perspective than the development team.

6.4 PRAGMATIC ARTIFACTS

 People want to review information but don't understand the language of the artifact. Many
interested reviewers of a particular artifact will resist having to learn the engineering language in
which the artifact is written. It is not uncommon to find people (such as veteran software
managers, veteran quality assurance specialists, or an auditing authority from a regulatory
agency) who react as follows: "I'm not going to learn UML, but I want to review the design of
this software, so give me a separate description such as some flowcharts and text that I can
understand."
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  People want to review the information but don't have access to the tools. It is not very common
for the development organization to be fully tooled; it is extremely rare that the/other stakeholders
have any capability to review the engineering artifacts on-line. Consequently, organizations are
forced to exchange paper documents. Standardized formats (such as UML, spreadsheets, Visual
Basic, C++, and Ada 95), visualization tools, and the Web are rapidly making it economically
feasible for all stakeholders to exchange information electronically.
 Human-readable engineering artifacts should use rigorous notations that are complete, consistent,
and used in a self-documenting manner. Properly spelled English words should be used for all
identifiers and descriptions. Acronyms and abbreviations should be used only where they are well
accepted jargon in the context of the component's usage. Readability should be emphasized and
the use of proper English words should be required in all engineering artifacts. This practice
enables understandable representations, browse able formats (paperless review), more-rigorous
notations, and reduced error rates.
 Useful documentation is self-defining: It is documentation that gets used.
 Paper is tangible; electronic artifacts are too easy to change. On-line and Web-based artifacts can
be changed easily and are viewed with more skepticism because of their inherent volatility.

7.MODEL BASED SOFTWARE ARCHITECTURE

7.1 ARCHITECTURE: A MANAGEMENT PERSPECTIVE
The most critical technical product of a software project is its architecture: the infrastructure, control, and
data interfaces that permit software components to cooperate as a system and software designers to
cooperate efficiently as a team. When the communications media include multiple languages and
intergroup literacy varies, the communications problem can become extremely complex and even
unsolvable. If a software development team is to be successful, the inter project communications, as
captured in the software architecture, must be both accurate and precise.
From a management perspective, there are three different aspects of architecture.
1. An architecture (the intangible design concept) is the design of a software system this includes all
engineering necessary to specify a complete bill of materials.
2. An architecture baseline (the tangible artifacts) is a slice of information across the engineering artifact
sets sufficient to satisfy all stakeholders that the vision (function and quality) can be achieved within the
parameters of the business case (cost, profit, time, technology, and people).
3. An architecture description (a human-readable representation of an architecture, which is one of the
components of an architecture baseline) is an organized subset of information extracted from the design
set model(s). The architecture description communicates how the intangible concept is realized in the
tangible artifacts. The number of views and the level of detail in each view can vary widely.
The importance of software architecture and its close linkage with modern software development
processes can be summarized as follows:
 Achieving a stable software architecture represents a significant project milestone at which the
critical make/buy decisions should have been resolved.
 Architecture representations provide a basis for balancing the trade-offs between the problem
space (requirements and constraints) and the solution space (the operational product).
 The architecture and process encapsulate many of the important (high-payoff or high-risk)
communications among individuals, teams, organizations, and stakeholders.
 Poor architectures and immature processes are often given as reasons for project failures.
 A mature process, an understanding of the primary requirements, and a demonstrable architecture
are important prerequisites for predictable planning.

39
  Architecture development and process definition are the intellectual steps that map the problem to
a solution without violating the constraints; they require human innovation and cannot be
automated.
7.2 ARCHITECTURE: A TECHNICAL PERSPECTIVE
An architecture framework is defined in terms of views that are abstractions of the UML models in the
design set. The design model includes the full breadth and depth of information. An architecture view is
an abstraction of the design model; it contains only the architecturally significant information. Most real-
world systems require four views: design, process, component, and deployment. The purposes of these
views are as follows:
 Design: describes architecturally significant structures and functions of the design model
 Process: describes concurrency and control thread relationships among the design, component,
and deployment views
 Component: describes the structure of the implementation set
 Deployment: describes the structure of the deployment set
Figure 7-1 summarizes the artifacts of the design set, including the architecture views and architecture
description

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 The requirements model addresses the behaviour of the system as seen by its end users, analysts, and
testers. This view is modeled statically using use case and class diagrams, and dynamically using
sequence, collaboration, state chart, and activity diagrams.
 The use case view describes how the system's critical (architecturally significant) use cases are
realized by elements of the design model. It is modeled statically using use case diagrams, and
dynamically using any of the UML behavioural diagrams.
 The design view describes the architecturally significant elements of the design model. This view,
an abstraction of the design model, addresses the basic structure and functionality of the solution.
It is modeled statically using class and object diagrams, and dynamically using any of the UML
behavioural diagrams.
 The process view addresses the run-time collaboration issues involved in executing the
architecture on a distributed deployment model, including the logical software network topology
(allocation to processes and threads of control), interprocess communication, and state
management. This view is modeled statically using deployment diagrams, and dynamically using
any of the UML behavioural diagrams.
 The component view describes the architecturally significant elements of the implementation set.
This view, an abstraction of the design model, addresses the software source code realization of
the system from the perspective of the project's integrators and developers, especially with regard
to releases and configuration management. It is modeled statically using component diagrams, and
dynamically using any of the UML behavioral diagrams.
 The deployment view addresses the executable realization of the system, including the allocation
of logical processes in the distribution view (the logical software topology) to physical resources
of the deployment network (the physical system topology). It is modeled statically using
deployment diagrams, and dynamically using any of the UML behavioral diagrams.
Generally, an architecture baseline should include the following:
 Requirements: critical use cases, system-level quality objectives, and priority relationships among
features and qualities
 Design: names, attributes, structures, behaviours, groupings, and relationships of significant
classes and components
 Implementation: source component inventory and bill of materials (number, name, purpose, cost)
of all primitive components
 Deployment: executable components sufficient to demonstrate the critical use cases and the risk
associated with achieving the system qualities

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 UNIT-III
WorkFlows and Checkpoints of the Process-Software Process Workflows, Iteration Workflows, Major
Mile Stones, Minor Milestones, Periodic Status Assessments.
Iterative Process Planning-Work Breakdown Structures, Planning Guidelines, Cost and Schedule
Estimating. Interaction Planning Process, Pragmatic Planning.

WORKFLOW OF THE PROCESS

SOFTWARE PROCESS WORKFLOWS
The term WORKFLOWS is used to mean a thread of cohesive and mostly sequential activities.
Workflows are mapped to product artifacts There are seven top-level workflows:
1. Management workflow: controlling the process and ensuring win conditions for all stakeholders
2. Environment workflow: automating the process and evolving the maintenance environment
3. Requirements workflow: analyzing the problem space and evolving the requirements artifacts
4. Design workflow: modeling the solution and evolving the architecture and design artifacts
5. Implementation workflow: programming the components and evolving the implementation and
deployment artifacts
6. Assessment workflow: assessing the trends in process and product quality
7. Deployment workflow: transitioning the end products to the user
Figure 8-1 illustrates the relative levels of effort expected across the phases in each of the top-level
workflows.

Table 8-1 shows the allocation of artifacts and the emphasis of each workflow in each of the life-cycle
phases of inception, elaboration, construction, and transition.

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ITERATION WORKFLOWS
Iteration consists of a loosely sequential set of activities in various proportions, depending on where the
iteration is located in the development cycle. Each iteration is defined in terms of a set of allocated usage
scenarios. An individual iteration's workflow, illustrated in Figure 8-2, generally includes the following
sequence:
 Management: iteration planning to determine the content of the release and develop the detailed
plan for the iteration; assignment of work packages, or tasks, to the development team
 Environment: evolving the software change order database to reflect all new baselines and
changes to existing baselines for all product, test, and environment components
 Requirements: analyzing the baseline plan, the baseline architecture, and the baseline
requirements set artifacts to fully elaborate the use cases to be demonstrated at the end of this
iteration and their evaluation criteria; updating any requirements set artifacts to reflect changes
necessitated by results of this iteration's engineering activities.
 Design: evolving the baseline architecture and the baseline design set artifacts to elaborate fully
the design model and test model components necessary to demonstrate against the evaluation

43
 criteria allocated to this iteration; updating design set artifacts to reflect changes necessitated by
the results of this iteration's engineering activities
 Implementation: developing or acquiring any new components, and enhancing or modifying any
existing components, to demonstrate the evaluation criteria allocated to this iteration; integrating
and testing all new and modified components with existing baselines (previous versions)
 Assessment: evaluating the results of the iteration, including compliance with the allocated
evaluation criteria and the quality of the current baselines; identifying any rework required and
determining whether it should be performed before deployment of this release or allocated to the
next release; assessing results to improve the basis of the subsequent iteration's plan
 Deployment: transitioning the release either to an external organization (such as a user,
independent verification and validation contractor, or regulatory agency) or to internal closure by
conducting a post-mortem so that lessons learned can be captured and reflected in the next
iteration

Iterations in the inception and elaboration phases focus on management. Requirements, and design
activities. Iterations in the construction phase focus on design, implementation, and assessment. Iterations
in the transition phase focus on assessment and deployment. Figure 8-3 shows the emphasis on different
activities across the life cycle. An iteration represents the state of the overall architecture and the
complete deliverable system. An increment represents the current progress that will be combined with the
preceding iteration to from the next iteration. Figure 8-4, an example of a simple development life cycle,
illustrates the differences between iterations and increments.

44
45
 CHECK POINTS OF A PROCESS
Three types of joint management reviews are conducted throughout the process:
1. Major milestones. These system wide events are held at the end of each development phase. They
provide visibility to system wide issues, synchronize the management and engineering perspectives, and
verify that the aims of the phase have been achieved.
2. Minor milestones. These iteration-focused events are conducted to review the content of an iteration in
detail and to authorize continued work.
3. Status assessments. These periodic events provide management with frequent and regular insight into
the progress being made.
Each of the four phases-inception, elaboration, construction, and transition consists of one or more
iterations and concludes with a major milestone when a planned technical capability is produced in
demonstrable form. An iteration represents a cycle of activities for which there is a well-defined
intermediate result-a minor milestone-captured with two artifacts: a release specification (the evaluation
criteria and plan) and a release description (the results). Major milestones at the end of each phase use
formal, stakeholder-approved evaluation criteria and release descriptions; minor milestones use informal,
development-team-controlled versions of these artifacts.
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Figure 9-1 illustrates a typical sequence of project checkpoints for a relatively large project.

MAJOR MILESTONES
The four major milestones occur at the transition points between life-cycle phases. They can be used in
many different process models, including the conventional waterfall model. In an iterative model, the
major milestones are used to achieve concurrence among all stakeholders on the current state of the
project. Different stakeholders have very different concerns:
Customers: schedule and budget estimates, feasibility, risk assessment, requirements understanding,
progress, product line compatibility
Users: consistency with requirements and usage scenarios, potential for accommodating growth, quality
attributes
Architects and systems engineers: product line compatibility, requirements changes, trade-off analyses,
completeness and consistency, balance among risk, quality, and usability
Developers: sufficiency of requirements detail and usage scenario descriptions, frameworks for
component selection or development, resolution of development risk, product line compatibility,
sufficiency of the development environment
Maintainers: sufficiency of product and documentation artifacts, understandability, interoperability with
existing systems, sufficiency of maintenance environment
Others: possibly many other perspectives by stakeholders such as regulatory agencies, independent
verification and validation contractors, venture capital investors, subcontractors, associate contractors,
and sales and marketing teams
Table 9-1 summarizes the balance of information across the major milestones.

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Life-Cycle Objectives Milestone
The life-cycle objectives milestone occurs at the end of the inception phase. The goal is to present to all
stakeholders a recommendation on how to proceed with development, including a plan, estimated cost
and schedule, and expected benefits and cost savings. A successfully completed life-cycle objectives
milestone will result in authorization from all stakeholders to proceed with the elaboration phase.
Life-Cycle Architecture Milestone
The life-cycle architecture milestone occurs at the end of the elaboration phase. The primary goal is to
demonstrate an executable architecture to all stakeholders. The baseline architecture consists of both a
human readable representation (the architecture document) and a configuration-controlled set of software
components captured in the engineering artifacts. A successfully completed life-cycle architecture
milestone will result in authorization from the stakeholders to proceed with the construction phase.
The technical data listed in Figure 9-2 should have been reviewed by the time of the lifecycle architecture
milestone.

48
Figure 9-3 provides default agendas for this milestone.

Initial Operational Capability Milestone

The initial operational capability milestone occurs late in the construction phase. The goals are to assess
the readiness of the software to begin the transition into customer/user sites and to authorize the start of
acceptance testing. Acceptance testing can be done incrementally across multiple iterations or can be
completed entirely during the transition phase is not necessarily the completion of the construction phase.
Product Release Milestone

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The product release milestone occurs at the end of the transition phase. The goal is to assess the
completion of the software and its transition to the support organization, if any. The results of acceptance
testing are reviewed, and all open issues are addressed. Software quality metrics are reviewed to
determine whether quality is sufficient for transition to the support organization.
MINOR MILESTONES
For most iterations, which have a one-month to six-month duration, only two minor milestones are
needed: the iteration readiness review and the iteration assessment review.
 Iteration Readiness Review. This informal milestone is conducted at the start of each iteration to
review the detailed iteration plan and the evaluation criteria that have been allocated to this
iteration.
 Iteration Assessment Review. This informal milestone is conducted at the end of each iteration to
assess the degree to which the iteration achieved its objectives and satisfied its evaluation criteria,
to review iteration results, to review qualification test results (if part of the iteration), to determine
the amount of rework to be done, and to review the impact of the iteration results on the plan for
subsequent iterations.
The format and content of these minor milestones tend to be highly dependent on the project and the
organizational culture. Figure 9-4 identifies the various minor milestones to be considered when a project
is being planned.

PERIODIC STATUS ASSESSMENTS

Periodic status assessments are management reviews conducted at regular intervals (monthly, quarterly)
to address progress and quality indicators, ensure continuous attention to project dynamics, and maintain
open communications among all stakeholders.
Periodic status assessments serve as project snapshots. While the period may vary, the recurring event
forces the project history to be captured and documented. Status assessments provide the following:

50
  A mechanism for openly addressing, communicating, and resolving management issues, technical
issues, and project risks
 Objective data derived directly from on-going activities and evolving product configurations
 A mechanism for disseminating process, progress, quality trends, practices, and experience
information to and from all stakeholders in an open forum
Periodic status assessments are crucial for focusing continuous attention on the evolving health of the
project and its dynamic priorities. They force the software project manager to collect and review the data
periodically, force outside peer review, and encourage dissemination of best practices to and from other
stakeholders.

The default content of periodic status assessments should include the topics identified in Table 9-2.

ITERATIVE PROCESS PLANNING

WORK BREAKDOWN STRUCTURE

A good work breakdown structure and its synchronization with the process framework are critical factors
in software project success. Development of a work breakdown structure dependent on the project
management style, organizational culture, customer preference, financial constraints, and several other
hard-to-define, project-specific parameters. A WBS is simply a hierarchy of elements that decomposes
the project plan into the discrete work tasks. A WBS provides the following information structure:
 A delineation of all significant work
 A clear task decomposition for assignment of responsibilities
 A framework for scheduling, budgeting, and expenditure tracking

51
Many parameters can drive the decomposition of work into discrete tasks: product subsystems,
components, functions, organizational units, life-cycle phases, even geographies. Most systems have a
first-level decomposition by subsystem. Subsystems are then decomposed into their components, one of
which is typically the software.

CONVENTIONAL WBS ISSUES

Conventional work breakdown structures frequently suffer from three fundamental flaws.
1. They are prematurely structured around the product design.
2. They are prematurely decomposed, planned, and budgeted in either too much or too little detail.
3. They are project-specific, and cross-project comparisons are usually difficult or impossible.
Conventional work breakdown structures are prematurely structured around the product design.
Figure 10-1 shows a typical conventional WBS that has been structured primarily around the subsystems
of its product architecture, then further decomposed into the components of each subsystem. A WBS is
the architecture for the financial plan.

Figure 10-1 Conventional work breakdown structure, following the product hierarchy:
Management
System requirement and design
Subsystem 1
Component 11
Requirements
Design
Code
Test
Documentation
…(similar structures for other components)
Component 1N
Requirements
Design
Code
Test
Documentation
…(similar structures for other subsystems)
Subsystem M
Component M1
Requirements

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 Design
Code
Test
Documentation
…(similar structures for other components)
Component MN
Requirements
Design
Code
Test
Documentation

Integration and test

Test planning
Test procedure preparation
Testing
Test reports
Other support areas
Configuration control
Quality assurance
System administration
Conventional work breakdown structures are prematurely decomposed, planned, and budgeted in
either too little or too much detail. Large software projects tend to be over planned and small projects
tend to be under planned. The basic problem with planning too much detail at the outset is that the detail
does not evolve with the level of fidelity in the plan.
Conventional work breakdown structures are project-specific, and cross-project comparisons are
usually difficult or impossible. With no standard WBS structure, it is extremely difficult to compare
plans, financial data, schedule data, organizational efficiencies, cost trends, productivity trends, or quality
trends across multiple projects.
EVOLUTIONARY WORK BREAKDOWN STRUCTURES
An evolutionary WBS should organize the planning elements around the process framework rather than
the product framework. The basic recommendation for the WBS is to organize the hierarchy as follows:
 First-level WBS elements are the workflows (management, environment, requirements, design,
implementation, assessment, and deployment).
 Second-level elements are defined for each phase of the life cycle (inception, elaboration,
construction, and transition).
 Third-level elements are defined for the focus of activities that produce the artifacts of each phase.
A default WBS consistent with the process framework (phases, workflows, and artifacts) is shown
in Figure 10-2. This recommended structure provides one example of how the elements of the process
53
framework can be integrated into a plan. It provides a framework for estimating the costs and schedules
of each element, allocating them across a project organization, and tracking expenditures.
The structure shown is intended to be merely a starting point. It needs to be tailored to the
specifics of a project in many ways.
 Scale. Larger projects will have more levels and substructures.
 Organizational structure. Projects that include subcontractors or span multiple
organizational entities may introduce constraints that necessitate different WBS
allocations.
 Degree of custom development. Depending on the character of the project, there can be
very different emphases in the requirements, design, and implementation workflows.
 Business context. Projects developing commercial products for delivery to a broad
customer base may require much more elaborate substructures for the deployment element.
 Precedent experience. Very few projects start with a clean slate. Most of them are
developed as new generations of a legacy system (with a mature WBS) or in the context of
existing organizational standards (with preordained WBS expectations).
The WBS decomposes the character of the project and maps it to the life cycle, the budget, and the
personnel. Reviewing a WBS provides insight into the important attributes, priorities, and structure of the
project plan. Another important attribute of a good WBS is that the planning fidelity inherent in each
element is commensurate with the current life-cycle phase and project state. Figure 10-3 illustrates this
idea. One of the primary reasons for organizing the default WBS the way I have is to allow for planning
elements that range from planning packages (rough budgets that are maintained as an estimate for future
elaboration rather than being decomposed into detail) through fully planned activity networks (with a
well-defined budget and continuous assessment of actual versus planned expenditures).

Figure 10-2 Default work breakdown structure

A Management
AA Inception phase management
AAA Business case development
AAB Elaboration phase release specifications
AAC Elaboration phase WBS specifications
AAD Software development plan
AAE Inception phase project control and status assessments
AB Elaboration phase management
ABA Construction phase release specifications
ABB Construction phase WBS baselining
ABC Elaboration phase project control and status assessments
AC Construction phase management
ACA Deployment phase planning
ACB Deployment phase WBS baselining
ACC Construction phase project control and status assessments
AD Transition phase management
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 ADA Next generation planning
ADB Transition phase project control and status assessments
B Environment
BA Inception phase environment specification
BB Elaboration phase environment baselining
BBA Development environment installation and administration
BBB Development environment integration and custom toolsmithing
BBC SCO database formulation
BC Construction phase environment maintenance
BCA Development environment installation and administration
BCB SCO database maintenance
BD Transition phase environment maintenance
BDA Development environment maintenance and administration
BDB SCO database maintenance
BDC Maintenance environment packaging and transition
C Requirements
CA Inception phase requirements development
CCA Vision specification
CAB Use case modeling
CB Elaboration phase requirements baselining
CBA Vision baselining
CBB Use case model baselining
CC Construction phase requirements maintenance
CD Transition phase requirements maintenance
D Design
DA Inception phase architecture prototyping
DB Elaboration phase architecture baselining
DBA Architecture design modeling
DBB Design demonstration planning and conduct
DBC Software architecture description
DC Construction phase design modeling
DCA Architecture design model maintenance
DCB Component design modeling
DD Transition phase design maintenance

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E Implementation
EA Inception phase component prototyping
EB Elaboration phase component implementation
EBA Critical component coding demonstration integration
EC Construction phase component implementation
ECA Initial release(s) component coding and stand-alone testing
ECB Alpha release component coding and stand-alone testing
ECC Beta release component coding and stand-alone testing
ECD Component maintenance
F Assessment
FA Inception phase assessment
FB Elaboration phase assessment
FBA Test modeling
FBB Architecture test scenario implementation
FBC Demonstration assessment and release descriptions
FC Construction phase assessment
FCA Initial release assessment and release description
FCB Alpha release assessment and release description
FCC Beta release assessment and release description
FD Transition phase assessment
FDA Product release assessment and release description
G Deployment
GA Inception phase deployment planning
GB Elaboration phase deployment planning
GC Construction phase deployment
GCA User manual baselining
GD Transition phase deployment
GDA Product transition to user

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PLANNING GUIDELINES
Software projects span a broad range of application domains. It is valuable but risky to make specific
planning recommendations independent of project context. Project-independent planning advice is also
risky. There is the risk that the guidelines may Be adopted blindly without being adapted to specific
project circumstances. Two simple planning guidelines should be considered when a project plan is being
initiated or assessed. The first guideline, detailed in Table 10-1, prescribes a default allocation of costs
among the first-level WBS elements. The second guideline, detailed in Table 10-2, prescribes the
allocation of effort and schedule across the lifecycle phases.

THE COST AND SCHEDULE ESTIMATING PROCESS

Project plans need to be derived from two perspectives. The first is a forward-looking, top-down
approach. It starts with an understanding of the general requirements and constraints, derives a macro-

57
level budget and schedule, then decomposes these elements into lower level budgets and intermediate
milestones. From this perspective, the following planning sequence would occur:
1. The software project manager (and others) develops a characterization of the overall size,
process, environment, people, and quality required for the project.
2. A macro-level estimate of the total effort and schedule is developed using a software cost
estimation model.
3. The software project manager partitions the estimate for the effort into a top-level WBS using
guidelines such as those in Table 10-1.
4. At this point, subproject managers are given the responsibility for decomposing each of the
WBS elements into lower levels using their top-level allocation, staffing profile, and major milestone
dates as constraints.
The second perspective is a backward-looking, bottom-up approach. We start with the end in
mind, analyze the micro-level budgets and schedules, then sum all these elements into the higher level
budgets and intermediate milestones. This approach tends to define and populate the WBS from the
lowest levels upward. From this perspective, the following planning sequence would occur:
1. The lowest level WBS elements are elaborated into detailed tasks
2. Estimates are combined and integrated into higher level budgets and milestones.
3. Comparisons are made with the top-down budgets and schedule milestones.
Milestone scheduling or budget allocation through top-down estimating tends to exaggerate the
project management biases and usually results in an overly optimistic plan. Bottom-up estimates usually
exaggerate the performer biases and result in an overly pessimistic plan. These two planning approaches
should be used together, in balance, throughout the life cycle of the project. During the engineering stage,
the top-down perspective will dominate because there is usually not enough depth of understanding nor
stability in the detailed task sequences to perform credible bottom-up planning. During the production
stage, there should be enough precedent experience and planning fidelity that the bottom-up planning
perspective will dominate. Top-down approach should be well tuned to the project specific parameters, so
it should be used more as a global assessment technique. Figure 10-4 illustrates this lifecycle planning
balance.

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THE ITERATION PLANNING PROCESS
Planning is concerned with defining the actual sequence of intermediate results. An evolutionary build
plan is important because there are always adjustments in build content and schedule as early conjecture
evolves into well-understood project circumstances. Iteration is used to mean a complete synchronization
across the project, with a well-orchestrated global assessment of the entire project baseline.
 Inception iterations. The early prototyping activities integrate the foundation components of a
candidate architecture and provide an executable framework for elaborating the critical use cases
of the system. This framework includes existing components, commercial components, and
custom prototypes sufficient to demonstrate a candidate architecture and sufficient requirements
understanding to establish a credible business case, vision, and software development plan.
 Elaboration iterations. These iterations result in architecture, including a complete framework and
infrastructure for execution. Upon completion of the architecture iteration, a few critical use cases
should be demonstrable: (1) initializing the architecture, (2) injecting a scenario to drive the worst-
case data processing flow through the system (for example, the peak transaction throughput or
peak load scenario), and (3) injecting a scenario to drive the worst-case control flow through the
system (for example, orchestrating the fault-tolerance use cases).
 Construction iterations. Most projects require at least two major construction iterations: an alpha
release and a beta release.
 Transition iterations. Most projects use a single iteration to transition a beta release into the final
product.
The general guideline is that most projects will use between four and nine iterations. The typical
project would have the following six-iteration profile:
 One iteration in inception: an architecture prototype.
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  Two iterations in elaboration: architecture prototype and architecture baseline.
 Two iterations in construction: alpha and beta releases.
 One iteration in transition: product release
A very large or unprecedented project with many stakeholders may require additional inception
iteration and two additional iterations in construction, for a total of nine iterations.

PRAGMATIC PLANNING
Even though good planning is more dynamic in an iterative process, doing it accurately is far easier.
While executing iteration N of any phase, the software project manager must be monitoring and
controlling against a plan that was initiated in iteration N - 1 and must be planning iteration N + 1. The art
of good project· management is to make trade-offs in the current iteration plan and the next iteration plan
based on objective results in the current iteration and previous iterations. Aside from bad architectures
and misunderstood requirements, inadequate planning (and subsequent bad management) is one of the
most common reasons for project failures. Conversely, the success of every successful project can be
attributed in part to good planning.
A project's plan is a definition of how the project requirements will be transformed into' a product
within the business constraints. It must be realistic, it must be current, it must be a team product, it must
be understood by the stakeholders, and it must be used.
Plans are not just for managers. The more open and visible the planning process and results, the
more ownership there is among the team members who need to execute it. Bad, closely held plans cause
attrition. Good, open plans can shape cultures and encourage teamwork.

UNIT-IV
Project Organizations: Line-of-Business Organizations, Project Organizations, Evolution of
Organizations, Process Automation: Building Blocks, the Project Environment.
Project Control and Process Instrumentation: Seven Core Metrics, Management Indicators, Quality
Indicators, Life Cycle Expectations Pragmatic Software metrics, Metrics Automation

LINE-OF-BUSINESS ORGANIZATIONS

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The main features of default organization are as follows:
• Responsibility for process definition & maintenance is specific to a cohesive line of business.
• Responsibility for process automation is an organizational role & is equal in importance to the process
definition role.
• Organizational role may be fulfilled by a single individual or several different teams.

Software Engineering Process Authority (SEPA)

The SEPA facilities the exchange of information & process guidance both to & from project
practitioners This role is accountable to General Manager for maintaining a current assessment of the
organization’s process maturity & its plan for future improvement
Project Review Authority (PRA)
The PRA is the single individual responsible for ensuring that a software project complies with all
organizational & business unit software policies, practices & standards. A software Project Manager is
responsible for meeting the requirements of a contract or some other project compliance standard
Software Engineering Environment Authority (SEEA)
The SEEA is responsible for automating the organization’s process, maintaining the
organization’s standard environment, Training projects to use the environment & maintaining
organization-wide reusable assets. The SEEA role is necessary to achieve a significant ROI for common
process.
Infrastructure
An organization’s infrastructure provides human resources support, project-independent research &
development, & other capital software engineering assets.

PROJECT ORGANIZATIONS
The figure below shows a default project organization and maps project-level roles and responsibilities:

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The main features of the default organization are as follows:
• The project management team is an active participant, responsible for producing as well as
managing.
The architecture team is responsible for real artifacts and for the integration of components, not
just for staff functions.
• The development team owns the component construction and maintenance activities.
• The assessment team is separate from development.
• Quality is everyone’s into all activities and checkpoints.
• Each team takes responsibility for a different quality perspective.
Software Management Team:
The Software management team is responsible for planning the efforts, conducting the plan, and adapting
the plan to the changes in the understanding of requirements or design. It takes the ownership of all aspect
of quality. Schedules, cost, functionality and quality expectations are highly interrelated and requires
continuous negotiation among multiple stakeholders who has different goals. The software management
team carries the burden of delivering win conditions to all stakeholders.

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Software Architecture Team:
The software architecture team is responsible for architecture. For any project, the skill of the software
architecture team is very crucial. With a good architecture team, an average development team can
succeed. If the architecture is weak, then even an expert development team cannot succeed. The inception
and elaboration phases of any projects are dominated by the management and architecture teams.
The architecture team must have expertise in Domain experience and Software Technology experience.
Domain experience is necessary to produce acceptable use case view and design view. Software
Technology experience for producing acceptable process , component and deployment view.

Software Development Team:

The software development team is the most application-specific group. It comprises of several sub teams
dedicated to group of components that requires a common skill set. Typical skill set include the
following:

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Software Assessment Team:

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EVOLUTION OF ORGANIZATIONS
The project organization represents the architecture of team which should be consistenly evolved
with the project plan captured in WBS. The following figure illustrates how the team’s focus shifts over
the life cycle:

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