Module 4 – Project planning

Software pricing

 Plan-driven development

 Project scheduling

 Agile planning

 Estimation techniques

Project planning
 Project planning involves breaking down the work into parts and assign these to
project team members, anticipate problems that might arise and prepare
tentative solutions to those problems.

 The project plan, which is created at the start of a project, is used to

communicate how the work will be done to the project team and customers, and
to help assess progress on the project.

Planning stages

 At the proposal stage, when you are bidding for a contract to develop or provide
a software system.

 During the project startup phase, when you have to plan who will work on the
project, how the project will be broken down into increments, how resources will
be allocated across your company, etc.

 Periodically throughout the project, when you modify your plan in the light of
experience gained and information from monitoring the progress of the work.

Proposal planning

 Planning may be necessary with only outline software requirements.

 The aim of planning at this stage is to provide information that will be used in
setting a price for the system to customers.
 Software pricing

 Estimates are made to discover the cost, to the developer, of producing a

software system.

 You take into account, hardware, software, travel, training and effort
costs.

 There is not a simple relationship between the development cost and the price
charged to the customer.

 Broader organisational, economic, political and business considerations influence

the price charged.

Factors affecting software pricing

Factor Description

Market opportunity A development organization may quote a low price because it wishes to
move into a new segment of the software market. Accepting a low profit
on one project may give the organization the opportunity to make a
greater profit later. The experience gained may also help it develop new
products.

Cost estimate If an organization is unsure of its cost estimate, it may increase its price
uncertainty by a contingency over and above its normal profit.

Contractual terms A customer may be willing to allow the developer to retain ownership of
the source code and reuse it in other projects. The price charged may
then be less than if the software source code is handed over to the
customer.
 Plan-driven development
 Plan-driven or plan-based development is an approach to software engineering
where the development process is planned in detail.

 Plan-driven development is based on engineering project management

techniques and is the ‘traditional’ way of managing large software
development projects.

 A project plan is created that records the work to be done, who will do it, the
development schedule and the work products.

 Managers use the plan to support project decision making and as a way of
measuring progress.

Plan-driven development – pros and cons

 The arguments in favor of a plan-driven approach are that early planning allows
organizational issues (availability of staff, other projects, etc.) to be closely taken
into account, and that potential problems and dependencies are discovered
before the project starts, rather than once the project is underway.

 The principal argument against plan-driven development is that many early

decisions have to be revised because of changes to the environment in which the
software is to be developed and used.

Project plans

 In a plan-driven development project, a project plan sets out the resources

available to the project, the work breakdown and a schedule for carrying out the
work.

 Plan sections
 Introduction

 Project organization
 Risk analysis
 Hardware and software resource requirements
  Work breakdown
 Project schedule
 Monitoring and reporting mechanisms

Project plan supplements

Plan Description

Quality plan Describes the quality procedures and standards that

will be used in a project.

Validation plan Describes the approach, resources, and schedule used

for system validation.

Configuration Describes the configuration management procedures

management plan and structures to be used.

Maintenance plan Predicts the maintenance requirements, costs, and

effort.

Staff development plan Describes how the skills and experience of the project
team members will be developed.

The planning process

 Project planning is an iterative process that starts when you create an initial
project plan during the project startup phase.

 Plan changes are inevitable.

 As more information about the system and the project team becomes
available during the project, you should regularly revise the plan to
reflect requirements, schedule and risk changes.
  Changing business goals also leads to changes in project plans. As
business goals change, this could affect all projects, which may then have
to be re-planned.
The project planning process

Project scheduling

 Project scheduling is the process of deciding how the work in a project will be
organized as separate tasks, and when and how these tasks will be executed.

 You estimate the calendar time needed to complete each task, the effort
required and who will work on the tasks that have been identified.

 You also have to estimate the resources needed to complete each task, such as
the disk space required on a server, the time required on specialized hardware,
such as a simulator, and what the travel budget will be.
Project scheduling activities

 Split project into tasks and estimate time and resources required to complete
each task.

 Organize tasks concurrently to make optimal

use of workforce.

 Minimize task dependencies to avoid delays

caused by one task waiting for another to complete.

 Dependent on project managers intuition and experience.

Milestones and deliverables

 Milestones are points in the schedule against which you can assess progress, for
example, the handover of the system for testing.

Deliverables are work products that are delivered to the customer, e.g. a requirements
document for the system

Scheduling problems

 Estimating the difficulty of problems and hence the cost of developing a solution
is hard.

 Productivity is not proportional to the number of people working on a task.

  Adding people to a late project makes it later because of communication
overheads.

 The unexpected always happens. Always allow contingency in planning.

Schedule representation

 Graphical notations are normally used to illustrate the project schedule.

 These show the project breakdown into tasks. Tasks should not be too small.
They should take about a week or two.

 Bar charts are the most commonly used representation for project schedules.
They show the schedule as activities or resources against time.

Tasks, durations, and dependencies

Task Effort (person-days) Duration (days) Dependencies

T1 15 10

T2 8 15

T3 20 15 T1 (M1)

T4 5 10

T5 5 10 T2, T4 (M3)

T6 10 5 T1, T2 (M4)

T7 25 20 T1 (M1)

T8 75 25 T4 (M2)

T9 10 15 T3, T6 (M5)

T10 20 15 T7, T8 (M6)

T11 10 10 T9 (M7)

T12 20 10 T10, T11 (M8)

Activity bar chart

Staff allocation chart

Estimation techniques

 Organizations need to make software effort and cost estimates. There are two
types of technique that can be used to do this:

 Experience-based techniques The estimate of future effort requirements is

based on the manager’s experience of past projects and the application
domain. Essentially, the manager makes an informed judgment of what
the effort requirements are likely to be.

 Algorithmic cost modeling In this approach, a formulaic approach is used

to compute the project effort based on estimates of product attributes,
such as size, and process characteristics, such as experience of staff
involved.
Experience-based approaches

 Experience-based techniques rely on judgments based on experience of past

projects and the effort expended in these projects on software development
activities.

 Typically, you identify the deliverables to be produced in a project and the

different software components or systems that are to be developed.

 You document these in a spreadsheet, estimate them individually and compute

the total effort required.

 It usually helps to get a group of people involved in the effort estimation and to
ask each member of the group to explain their estimate.

Algorithmic cost modelling

 Cost is estimated as a mathematical function of

product, project and process attributes whose
values are estimated by project managers:

 Effort = A ´ SizeB ´ M

 A is an organisation-dependent constant, B reflects the disproportionate

effort for large projects and M is a multiplier reflecting product, process
and people attributes.

 The most commonly used product attribute for cost

estimation is code size.

 Most models are similar but they use different values for A, B and M.

Estimation accuracy

 The size of a software system can only be known accurately when it is finished.

 Several factors influence the final size

 Use of COTS and components;

  Programming language;

 Distribution of system.

 As the development process progresses then the size estimate becomes more
accurate.

 The estimates of the factors contributing to B and M are subjective and vary
according to the judgment of the estimator.

The COCOMO 2 model

 An empirical model based on project experience.

 Well-documented, ‘independent’ model which is not tied to a specific software

vendor.

 Long history from initial version published in 1981 (COCOMO-81) through various
instantiations to COCOMO 2.

 COCOMO 2 takes into account different approaches to software development,

reuse, etc.

COCOMO 2 models

 COCOMO 2 incorporates a range of sub-models that produce increasingly

detailed software estimates.

 The sub-models in COCOMO 2 are:

 Application composition model. Used when software is composed from

existing parts.

 Early design model. Used when requirements are available but design has
not yet started.

 Reuse model. Used to compute the effort of integrating reusable

components.

 Post-architecture model. Used once the system architecture has been

designed and more information about the system is available.
 COCOMO estimation models

Application composition model

 Supports prototyping projects and projects where there is extensive reuse.

 Based on standard estimates of developer productivity in application (object)

points/month.

 Takes CASE tool use into account.

 Formula is

 PM = ( NAP ´ (1 - %reuse/100 ) ) / PROD

 PM is the effort in person-months, NAP is the number of application points

and PROD is the productivity.
Application-point productivity

Developer’s Very low Low Nominal High Very high

experience
and capability

ICASE Very low Low Nominal High Very high

maturity and
capability

PROD 4 7 13 25 50
(NAP/month)

Early design model

 Estimates can be made after the requirements have been agreed.

 Based on a standard formula for algorithmic models

 PM = A ´ SizeB ´ M where

 M = PERS ´ RCPX ´ RUSE ´ PDIF ´ PREX ´ FCIL ´ SCED;

A = 2.94 in initial calibration, Size in KLOC, B varies from 1.1 to 1.24 depending on
novelty of the project, development flexibility, risk management approaches and the
process maturity

Multipliers

 Multipliers reflect the capability of the developers, the non-functional

requirements, the familiarity with the development platform, etc.

 RCPX - product reliability and complexity;

 RUSE - the reuse required;

 PDIF - platform difficulty;

  PREX - personnel experience;

 PERS - personnel capability;

 SCED - required schedule;

 FCIL - the team support facilities.

The reuse model

 Takes into account black-box code that is reused without change and code that
has to be adapted to integrate it with new code.

 There are two versions:

 Black-box reuse where code is not modified. An effort estimate (PM) is

computed.

 White-box reuse where code is modified. A size estimate equivalent to the

number of lines of new source code is computed. This then adjusts the size
estimate for new code.

Reuse model estimates 1

 For generated code:

 PM = (ASLOC * AT/100)/ATPROD

 ASLOC is the number of lines of generated code

 AT is the percentage of code automatically generated.

 ATPROD is the productivity of engineers in integrating this code.

Reuse model estimates 2

 When code has to be understood and integrated:

 ESLOC = ASLOC * (1-AT/100) * AAM.

 ASLOC and AT as before.

  AAM is the adaptation adjustment multiplier computed from the costs of
changing the reused code, the costs of understanding how to integrate the
code and the costs of reuse decision making.

Post-architecture level

 Uses the same formula as the early design model but with 17 rather than 7
associated multipliers.

 The code size is estimated as:

 Number of lines of new code to be developed;

 Estimate of equivalent number of lines of new code computed using the

reuse model;

 An estimate of the number of lines of code that have to be modified

according to requirements changes.

The exponent term

 This depends on 5 scale factors (see next slide). Their sum/100 is added to 1.01

 A company takes on a project in a new domain. The client has not defined the
process to be used and has not allowed time for risk analysis. The company has a
CMM level 2 rating.

 Precedenteness - new project (4)

 Development flexibility - no client involvement - Very high (1)

 Architecture/risk resolution - No risk analysis - V. Low .(5)

 Team cohesion - new team - nominal (3)

 Process maturity - some control - nominal (3)

 Scale factor is therefore 1.17.

Scale factors used in the exponent computation in the post-architecture model

Scale factor Explanation

Precedentedness Reflects the previous experience of the organization with this

type of project. Very low means no previous experience; extra-
high means that the organization is completely familiar with
this application domain.

Development flexibility Reflects the degree of flexibility in the development process.

Very low means a prescribed process is used; extra-high means
that the client sets only general goals.

Architecture/risk Reflects the extent of risk analysis carried out. Very low means
resolution little analysis; extra-high means a complete and thorough risk
analysis.

Team cohesion Reflects how well the development team knows each other
and work together. Very low means very difficult interactions;
extra-high means an integrated and effective team with no
communication problems.

Process maturity Reflects the process maturity of the organization. The

computation of this value depends on the CMM Maturity
Questionnaire, but an estimate can be achieved by subtracting
the CMM process maturity level from 5.

Multipliers

 Product attributes

 Concerned with required characteristics of the software product being

developed.

 Computer attributes
  Constraints imposed on the software by the hardware platform.

 Personnel attributes

 Multipliers that take the experience and capabilities of the people working
on the project into account.

 Project attributes

 Concerned with the particular characteristics of the software development

project.

The effect of cost drivers on effort estimates

Exponent value 1.17

System size (including factors for 128,000 DSI

reuse and requirements
volatility)

Initial COCOMO estimate 730 person-months

without cost drivers

Reliability Very high, multiplier = 1.39

Complexity Very high, multiplier = 1.3

Memory constraint High, multiplier = 1.21

Tool use Low, multiplier = 1.12

Schedule Accelerated, multiplier = 1.29

Adjusted COCOMO estimate 2,306 person-months

The effect of cost drivers on effort estimates

Exponent value
Exponent value 1.17

Reliability Very low, multiplier = 0.75

Complexity Very low, multiplier = 0.75

Memory constraint None, multiplier = 1

Tool use Very high, multiplier = 0.72

Schedule Normal, multiplier = 1

Adjusted COCOMO estimate 295 person-months

Project duration and staffing

 As well as effort estimation, managers must estimate the calendar time required
to complete a project and when staff will be required.

 Calendar time can be estimated using a COCOMO 2 formula

 TDEV = 3 ´ (PM)(0.33+0.2*(B-1.01))

 PM is the effort computation and B is the exponent computed as discussed

above (B is 1 for the early prototyping model). This computation predicts
the nominal schedule for the project.

 The time required is independent of the number of people working on the

project.

Staffing requirements

 Staff required can’t be computed by diving the development time by the required
schedule.
 The number of people working on a project varies depending on the phase of the
project.

 The more people who work on the project, the more total effort is usually
required.

 A very rapid build-up of people often correlates with schedule slippage.

Key points

 Estimation techniques for software may be experience-based, where managers

judge the effort required, or algorithmic, where the effort required is computed
from other estimated project parameters.

 The COCOMO II costing model is an algorithmic cost model that uses project,
product, hardware and personnel attributes as well as product size and
complexity attributes to derive a cost estimate.

Chapter 24 - Quality Management

 Software quality

 Software standards

 Reviews and inspections

 Software measurement and metrics

Software quality management

 Concerned with ensuring that the required level of quality is achieved in a

software product.

 Three principal concerns:

 At the organizational level, quality management is concerned with

establishing a framework of organizational processes and standards that
will lead to high-quality software.

 At the project level, quality management involves the application of

specific quality processes and checking that these planned processes have
been followed.
  At the project level, quality management is also concerned with
establishing a quality plan for a project. The quality plan should set out the
quality goals for the project and define what processes and standards are
to be used.

Quality management activities

 Quality management provides an independent check on the software

development process.

 The quality management process checks the project deliverables to ensure that
they are consistent with organizational standards and goals

 The quality team should be independent from the development team so that
they can take an objective view of the software. This allows them to report on
software quality without being influenced by software development issues.

Quality management and software development

Quality planning

 A quality plan sets out the desired product qualities and how these are assessed
and defines the most significant quality attributes.
 The quality plan should define the quality assessment process.

 It should set out which organisational standards should be applied and, where
necessary, define new standards to be used.

Quality plans

 Quality plan structure

 Product introduction;

 Product plans;

 Process descriptions;

 Quality goals;

 Risks and risk management.

 Quality plans should be short, succinct documents

 If they are too long, no-one will read them.

Scope of quality management

 Quality management is particularly important for large, complex systems. The

quality documentation is a record of progress and supports continuity of
development as the development team changes.

 For smaller systems, quality management needs less documentation and should
focus on establishing a quality culture.

Software quality

 Quality, simplistically, means that a product should meet its specification.

 This is problematical for software systems

 There is a tension between customer quality requirements (efficiency,

reliability, etc.) and developer quality requirements (maintainability,
reusability, etc.);

 Some quality requirements are difficult to specify in an unambiguous way;

  Software specifications are usually incomplete and often inconsistent.

 The focus may be ‘fitness for purpose’ rather than specification conformance.

Software fitness for purpose

 Have programming and documentation standards been followed in the

development process?

 Has the software been properly tested?

 Is the software sufficiently dependable to be put into use?

 Is the performance of the software acceptable for normal use?

 Is the software usable?

 Is the software well-structured and understandable?

Software quality attributes

Safety Understandability Portability

Security Testability Usability

Reliability Adaptability Reusability

Resilience Modularity Efficiency

Robustness Complexity Learnability

Quality conflicts

 It is not possible for any system to be optimized for all of these attributes – for
example, improving robustness may lead to loss of performance.

 The quality plan should therefore define the most important quality attributes for
the software that is being developed.
 The plan should also include a definition of the quality assessment process, an
agreed way of assessing whether some quality, such as maintainability or
robustness, is present in the product.

Process and product quality

 The quality of a developed product is influenced by the quality of the production

process.

 This is important in software development as some product quality attributes are

hard to assess.

 However, there is a very complex and poorly understood relationship between

software processes and product quality.

 The application of individual skills and experience is particularly important

in software development;

 External factors such as the novelty of an application or the need for an

accelerated development schedule may impair product quality.

Process-based quality
Software standards

 Standards define the required attributes of a product or process. They play an

important role in quality management.

 Standards may be international, national, organizational or project standards.

 Product standards define characteristics that all software components should

exhibit e.g. a common programming style.

 Process standards define how the software process should be enacted.

Importance of standards

 Encapsulation of best practice- avoids repetition of past mistakes.

 They are a framework for defining what quality means in a particular setting i.e.
that organization’s view of quality.

 They provide continuity - new staff can understand the organisation by

understanding the standards that are used.

Product and process standards

Product standards Process standards

Design review form Design review conduct

Requirements document Submission of new code for

structure system building

Method header format Version release process

Java programming style Project plan approval process

Project plan format Change control process

Change request form Test recording process

Problems with standards

 They may not be seen as relevant and up-to-date by software engineers.

 They often involve too much bureaucratic form filling.

 If they are unsupported by software tools, tedious form filling work is often
involved to maintain the documentation associated with the standards.

Standards development

 Involve practitioners in development. Engineers should understand the

rationale underlying a standard.

 Review standards and their usage regularly.

Standards can quickly become outdated and this reduces their credibility
amongst practitioners.

 Detailed standards should have specialized tool

support. Excessive clerical work is the most
significant complaint against standards.

 Web-based forms are not good enough.

ISO 9001 standards framework

 An international set of standards that can be used as a basis for developing

quality management systems.

 ISO 9001, the most general of these standards, applies to organizations that
design, develop and maintain products, including software.

 The ISO 9001 standard is a framework for developing software standards.

 It sets out general quality principles, describes quality processes in

general and lays out the organizational standards and procedures that
should be defined. These should be documented in an organizational
quality manual.
ISO 9001 core processes

Reviews and inspections

 A group examines part or all of a process or system and its documentation to find
potential problems.

 Software or documents may be 'signed off' at a

review which signifies that progress to the next
development stage has been approved by
management.

 There are different types of review with different objectives

 Inspections for defect removal (product);

 Reviews for progress assessment (product and process);

 Quality reviews (product and standards).

Quality reviews
  A group of people carefully examine part or all
of a software system and its associated
documentation.

 Code, designs, specifications, test plans,

standards, etc. can all be reviewed.

 Software or documents may be 'signed off' at a

review which signifies that progress to the next
development stage has been approved by
management.

The software review process

Software measurement and metrics

 Software measurement is concerned with deriving a numeric value for an

attribute of a software product or process.

 This allows for objective comparisons between techniques and processes.

 Although some companies have introduced measurement programmes, most

organisations still don’t make systematic use of software measurement.

There are few established standards in this area

Software metric

 Any type of measurement which relates to a software system, process or related

documentation

 Lines of code in a program, the Fog index, number of person-days required

to develop a component.

 Allow the software and the software process to

be quantified.

 May be used to predict product attributes or to control the software process.

 Product metrics can be used for general predictions or to identify anomalous

components.

Predictor and control measurements

Use of measurements

 To assign a value to system quality attributes

 By measuring the characteristics of system components, such as their

cyclomatic complexity, and then aggregating these measurements, you
can assess system quality attributes, such as maintainability.

 To identify the system components whose quality is sub-standard

 Measurements can identify individual components with characteristics that

deviate from the norm. For example, you can measure components to
discover those with the highest complexity. These are most likely to
contain bugs because the complexity makes them harder to understand.

Relationships between internal and external software

Problems with measurement in industry

 It is impossible to quantify the return on investment of introducing an

organizational metrics program.

 There are no standards for software metrics or standardized processes for

measurement and analysis.

 In many companies, software processes are not standardized and are poorly
defined and controlled.

 Most work on software measurement has focused on code-based metrics and

plan-driven development processes. However, more and more software is now
developed by configuring ERP systems or COTS.

 Introducing measurement adds additional overhead to processes.

Product metrics

 A quality metric should be a predictor of product quality.

 Classes of product metric

  Dynamic metrics which are collected by measurements made of a program
in execution;

 Static metrics which are collected by measurements made of the system

representations;

 Dynamic metrics help assess efficiency and reliability

 Static metrics help assess complexity, understandability and

maintainability.

Static software product metrics

Software metric Description

Fan-in/Fan-out Fan-in is a measure of the number of functions or methods that call

another function or method (say X). Fan-out is the number of
functions that are called by function X. A high value for fan-in
means that X is tightly coupled to the rest of the design and
changes to X will have extensive knock-on effects. A high value for
fan-out suggests that the overall complexity of X may be high
because of the complexity of the control logic needed to
coordinate the called components.

Length of code This is a measure of the size of a program. Generally, the larger the
size of the code of a component, the more complex and error-
prone that component is likely to be. Length of code has been
shown to be one of the most reliable metrics for predicting error-
proneness in components.
Static software product metrics

Software metric Description

Fan-in/Fan-out Fan-in is a measure of the number of functions or methods

that call another function or method (say X). Fan-out is the
number of functions that are called by function X. A high
value for fan-in means that X is tightly coupled to the rest of
the design and changes to X will have extensive knock-on
effects. A high value for fan-out suggests that the overall
complexity of X may be high because of the complexity of
the control logic needed to coordinate the called
components.

Length of code This is a measure of the size of a program. Generally, the

larger the size of the code of a component, the more
complex and error-prone that component is likely to be.
Length of code has been shown to be one of the most
reliable metrics for predicting error-proneness in
components.

Static software product metrics

Software metric Description

Cyclomatic complexity This is a measure of the control complexity of a program. This

control complexity may be related to program understandability. I
discuss cyclomatic complexity in Chapter 8.
Length of identifiers This is a measure of the average length of identifiers (names for
variables, classes, methods, etc.) in a program. The longer the
identifiers, the more likely they are to be meaningful and hence
the more understandable the program.

Depth of conditional This is a measure of the depth of nesting of if-statements in a

nesting program. Deeply nested if-statements are hard to understand and
potentially error-prone.

Fog index This is a measure of the average length of words and sentences in
documents. The higher the value of a document’s Fog index, the
more difficult the document is to understand.

The CK object-oriented metrics suite

Object-oriented Description
metric

Weighted This is the number of methods in each class, weighted by the complexity of
methods per class each method. Therefore, a simple method may have a complexity of 1, and
(WMC) a large and complex method a much higher value. The larger the value for
this metric, the more complex the object class. Complex objects are more
likely to be difficult to understand. They may not be logically cohesive, so
cannot be reused effectively as superclasses in an inheritance tree.

Depth of This represents the number of discrete levels in the inheritance tree where
inheritance tree subclasses inherit attributes and operations (methods) from superclasses.
(DIT) The deeper the inheritance tree, the more complex the design. Many
object classes may have to be understood to understand the object classes
at the leaves of the tree.

Number of This is a measure of the number of immediate subclasses in a class. It

measures the breadth of a class hierarchy, whereas DIT measures its depth.
children (NOC) A high value for NOC may indicate greater reuse. It may mean that more
effort should be made in validating base classes because of the number of
subclasses that depend on them.