Approaches To Project Planning

Project planning is one of the most important steps that need to be done while developing software. The work needs to be broken into parts and then assigned to the team members. Another thing worth doing is trying to anticipate problems that might arise, and prepare 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.

There are 2 common approaches to project planning, plan-driven development, and agile development.

Plan-driven development – the development process is planned in detail. A project plan containing record the work to be done, assigned tasks to specific team members,

Introduction – brief description of the objectives, constraints like time, budget etc.

2. Project organisation – people involved in the project, and their roles in the team.

3. Risk analysis – description of possible project risks, and ways to prevent/deal with them.

4. Hardware and software resource requirements – all necessary hardware and software needed for development.

5. Work breakdown – splitting the project into tasks, identifying milestones.

6. Project schedule – each task is given estimated amount of time required, and assigned person.

7. Monitoring and reporting mechanisms – when management repots should be produced, and what monitoring methods used.

Agile development – software is developed and delivered to customers in number of iterations. Unlike plan-driven approach, the functionality of each of those iterations is not planned in advance, but decided during the development process. The decision on what to include in each specific iteration depends on progress and on the customer’s priorities.

The planning phase of agile development project (using SCRUM and XP) usually consists of:

1. Release planning – deciding on the features of the system.

2. Iteration planning – planning the next

The amount of stories should reflect the duration of an iteration, and the team’s velocity. At the start of each iteration, the user stories are broken down into development tasks. The developers then sing up for the specific task they implement. Every morning throughout the sprint there is a stand up meeting, where everyone has to review what he did the previous day, what problems they encountered, and what task they’re going to work on today. At the end on iteration, the story points for implemented user stories are added up, and velocity can be recalculated. The unfinished user stories are put back to the backlog, where there can be carried over to the next sprint, or reprioritized and put further back into the list. The main benefit from this way of working, is that each member has a clear understanding, what task have to be completed in given sprint, and who is working on what. Additionally, developers can choose the task they want to work on, rather than being assigned by the team manager, which results in better performance, as they’ll likely pick something they’re familiar with, and gives them individual responsibility for the