November 2013 Archive

A WBS can be organized in many ways, but it is generally best to arrange the activities around major work products and customer deliverables that will satisfy the customer's requirements. We make a distinction here between work products (anything tangible produced by

Tags deliverables, project charter, life cycle, project scope, affinity diagramming

Milestones deserve special mention. A milestone is an important event in a project, generally associated with a major work product or deliverable. They mark passage points in the journey toward completion, and every project should have enough of them, spread evenly

Tags milestones, wbs, software engineers, software utilities, processes

The WBS is the key work product needed to do software project estimating. In many projects, what hurts you the most are not the things that you estimate poorly, but the things that you forget to include at all. In preparation for sizing the work to be done (see "Software Size and

Tags software project, wbs, life cycle, software planning, software architectures

As explained in "Creating the Work Breakdown Structure" building a product-oriented work breakdown structure (WBS) involves decomposing a large activity (the whole project) into successively smaller activities (top-down approach) until the work is explained in detail to manage

Tags wbs, software project, life cycle, software product, project management skills

How difficult can it be to identify the work that needs to done for a software project? It's mostly common sense, isn't it? What seems like a straightforward assignment can be riddled with opportunities for poor results. The first thing to deal with is what tasks and activities are.

Tags spmp, development tools, software project, life cycle

There are in fact only two ways that tasks and activities are identified for a project: They are part of a pre-existing WBS for a software development life cycle, or they are invented again for a unique development project situation. Either way, customization takes place. We'll

Tags life cycle, checklists, maintenance activities, software products, deliverables, software project