Assignment: Software Development Plan Document

This course is comprised of a series of individual project assignments that will also contribute to a group project due at the end of the course. Each week, you will complete a part of a software development plan, and you will share your results with your assigned group after your individual project has been graded. The group will integrate the projects into a group-developed version of the software development plan.

Your team will select a software engineering project that will cover the development process from conception to deployment. You are expected to perform the following tasks:

• Select a development methodology to plan a real-life application.
• Perform a trade-off analysis covering quality, features, cost, and time for rapid development.
• Conduct requirements elicitation and documentation for the application.
• Prepare a systems component design.
• Organize a schedule that covers build, integration, and test of the application.
• Conduct a risk assessment for the project.

Throughout this course, you will be working on a software development plan for the project that your team selects. You will not be developing the software, but you will work extensively with the concepts of good system-engineering practices during the creation of the plan. Additional information and the deliverables for each individual project will be provided in the assignment description for the project. The final deliverable is also known as the Final Key Assignment.

Project Selection

The first step will be to select a project as the target for your team's software development plan. This project will be used as the basis for each of the individual project assignments throughout the course and should conform to the following guidelines:

• Nontrivial: The selected project should be large enough to allow reasonable exercise of the software development planning processes.

• Domain Knowledge: Students in the team should be familiar enough with the organization or software category to allow focus on the planning tasks without significant time required for domain education.

• Accessibility: Students in the team should have good access to the people and other information related to the organization or system because this will be an important part of the process.

After your instructor has assigned team members, your team should select a software development project that fits these requirements and submit a proposal to the instructor before proceeding further with the assignments in the course. Approval should be sought within the first several days of the course. Your instructor will tell you how to submit this proposal and what notification will be given for project approval.

Task

For the assignments in this course, your team will not be implementing the actual development project, but rather, you will be developing a comprehensive software development plan document. Your team's first task in this process will be to select a project to use as the basis of your plan. You will also create the shell document for the final project deliverable that you will be working on during each unit. As your team proceeds through each project week, you will individually and collectively add content to each section of the final document to gradually complete the final project delivery. Appropriate research should be conducted to support the analysis in your team's plan, and assumptions may be made when necessary.

Note: To be clear, each individual will be creating a software development plan in fulfillment of the individual project assignments, and the team will also create a software development plan in fulfillment of the group project due at the end of the course.

Team Project Deliverables

• Submit a project proposal to the instructor for approval.

• After the individual projects are graded, team members should share their results with the team. The team should then integrate the results into the team's version of the software development plan document. There is no submission for this part of the assignment until the end of the course.

Individual Project Deliverables

• Software development plan document shell

o Use Word
o Title page

- Course number and name
- Project name
- Student name
- Date

o Table of contents

- Auto-generated TOC
- Separate page
- Maximum of 3 levels deep
- Fields of TOC should be up-to-date before submitting

o Section headings (create each heading on a new page with TBD as content, except for sections listed under new content below)

- Project Outline
- Development Methodology
- Requirements
- Design
- Development and Testing
- Project Schedule
- Risk Analysis

• New content

o Project Outline

- Brief description of the project
- List of major issues to consider in the development of the application
- Material taken from approved proposal submitted to instructor
- Project must be approved by instructor

o Development Methodology

- Describe methodology that will be used for software development
- Include justification of selected methodology and why it suits project well

• After the assignment has been graded, share your document with your team through the team area in the classroom. Your team should decide whether documents will be shared through the Discussion Board or through the file uploads in the team area.