Explain Project Scheduling

Software project scheduling
  • Software project scheduling is an action that distributes estimated effort across the planned project duration by allocating the effort to specific software engineering tasks
  • Project-task scheduling is an important project planning activity. It involves deciding which tasks would be taken up when.
  • It is important to note, however, that the schedule evolves over time
  • During early stages of project planning, a macroscopic schedule is developed
  • This type of schedule identifies all major process framework activities and the product functions to which they are applied

Scheduling Principles

  • Compartmentalization
The product and process must be decomposed into a manageable number of activities and tasks
  • Interdependency
    • Tasks that can be completed in parallel must be separated from those that must completed serially
  • Time allocation

          Every task has start and completion dates that take the task interdependencies into account

  • Effort validation

            Project manager must ensure that on any given day there are enough staff members assigned to completed the tasks within the time   estimated in the project plan

  • Defined Responsibilities

            Every scheduled task needs to be assigned to a specific team member

  • Defined outcomes

            Every task in the schedule needs to have a defined outcome (usually a work product or deliverable)

  • Defined milestones

          A milestone is accomplished when one or more work products from an engineering task have passed quality review

Scheduling

  • Scheduling of a software project does not differ greatly from scheduling of any multitask engineering effort
  • Therefore, generalized project scheduling tools and techniques can be applied with little modification for software projects
  • Program evaluation and review technique (PERT) and the critical path method (CPM) are two project scheduling methods that can be applied to software development
  • Both techniques are driven by information already developed in earlier project planning activities: estimates of effort, a decomposition of the product function, the selection of the appropriate process model and task set, and decomposition of the tasks that are selected
  • Both PERT and CPM provide quantitative tools that allow you to
    • Determine the critical path—the chain of tasks that determines the duration of the project
    • Establish “most likely” time estimates for individual tasks by applying statistical models
    • Calculate “boundary times” that define a time “window” for a particular task

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