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.
Assignment
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
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
Use Word
Title page
Course number and name
Project name
Student name
Date
Table of contents
Auto-generated TOC
Separate page
Maximum of 3 levels deep
Fields of TOC should be up-to-date before submitting
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
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
Development Methodology
Describe methodology that will be used for software development
Include justification of selected methodology and why it suits project well
Part 2
One of the first major tasks in the software development process is to develop the requirements. Requirements analysis and documentation is an area that seldom receives adequate attention, but it is potentially the most important step in a successful software development project.
For this assignment, you will identify the requirements for the project you selected in the first week. You will also perform a requirements analysis to help solidify the requirements and prepare the path for the design of the software. Finally, you will prepare the design based on the requirements.
The following are the project deliverables:
Update the software development plan document title page with a new date and project name.
Update the previously completed sections based on your instructor's feedback.
Add the following new content:
Requirements:
Describe the approach that you will take to gather the requirements for the project.
Work through the steps in your requirements gathering process, and define the requirements for your project. Be sure to provide a sufficient number of high-level requirements (at least 10) to allow design of the application to proceed.
Describe the requirements elicitation process used and whether each requirement is functional or nonfunctional.
Requirements should be stated in measurable terms. At a minimum, the requirements should each include a description, rationale, measurement criterion, and priority.
Include an analysis of your requirements to ensure that the most important requirements are included, and summarize your conclusions.
Design:
Describe the overall architecture of your application.
Identify each of the major components of the application, and describe how they will work together. A component diagram should be used to illustrate the architecture, and a UML class diagram should be provided to show the class hierarchy and relationships for the application.
Provide at least 1 use case for each component to demonstrate how the component will be used in the application.
Prepare a visual design for the main screen of your application.
Address any data management requirements in your design.
Part 3
Now that the requirements and design are completed in your software development plan, the next step is to prepare for the development and testing of the application with a well-defined plan of action.
A development and testing plan helps ensure that the process will run smoothly and that decisions regarding the process have been made in advance.
For this assignment, you will write the development and testing portion of the software development plan.
The following are the project deliverables:
Update the software development plan document title page with a new date and project name.
Update the previously completed sections based on your instructor's feedback.
Add the following new content:
Development:
Summarize the development methodology to be used during the coding phase of the project.
Identify at least 3 key processes that you will use to drive the project during coding (e.g., identification and tracking of milestones using an Agile process).
Describe how the process works, the documentation required to track the process, and the approvals required during execution of the process.
Testing:
Identify the key phases of the project that will be subject to testing and the type of testing to be used during that phase.
Write at least 3 test cases for the project. Each test case should address the testing requirements in each of the major phases of the project (design, development, and release).
Each test case should address 1 of the major requirements or 1 of the major components of the application.
The test cases should identify the test process and the expected outcome for the test. Additional information required in each test case is purpose, prerequisites, any test data with values used, and the steps required to complete the test.
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 the file uploads in the team area.
Please submit your assignment.
Part 4
The software development plan is now mostly complete with respect to the planning, and many steps in the overall process have been defined. The next step is to prepare a project schedule so that the entire team and the stakeholders will understand the tasks and the completion dates.
For this assignment, you will prepare a project schedule.
The following are the project deliverables:
Update the software development plan document title page with a new date and project name.
Update the previously completed sections based on your instructor's feedback.
Add the following new content:
Project Schedule:
Identify each of the major milestones for the project, including the requirements, design, development, and testing phases. Note that no task should be longer than 1 week in duration, so if you have longer tasks, divide them into multiple, shorter tasks in an appropriate work breakdown structure (WBS).
Within each milestone, identify the tasks and their duration, the required resources to complete the tasks, and the major deliverables for the milestone (i.e., identify how you will determine if the milestone is complete).
Prepare a timeline for the project using the information above. The timeline should account for prerequisites and should also identify the major milestones. Include a Gantt chart and a network flow diagram showing the critical path for the project.
Discuss any float built into the project, and justify your reasoning.
Define how the project tasks will be tracked and how completion of tasks will be verified.
Be sure to update your table of contents before submission.
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 the file uploads in the team area.
Please submit your assignment.