Automated Software Project Planning and Control

Abstract

This paper describes an automated software project planning and control system developed in Budapest, Hungary and now in operation in three large West German corporations. The system consists of five major components, one for each basic project management task-System requirements analysis and documentation-project cost and time estimation-project activity and result planning,-project monitoring and control-system configuration management and quality controlIt operates on IBM and Siemens mainframe computers under the operating systems MVS. VM and BS2000. The methodological basis of the system is the entity/relationship model of ChenIn the first phase, the functional applications, information areas, participatingorganizations and requirements on these entities are defined using entitylattribute formats. The functional applications and information areas are defined both in terms of their estimated quantities - number of instructions and data elements, number of components, and number of function points - and in terms of their desired quality characteristics - reliability ergonomy, efficiency, maintainability, etc. Projects are then defined to fulfill the requirements placed on the applications and data areas as prescribed by IBM in its Business Systems Planning ApproachIn the second phase, the project effort and calendar time as well as the predicted maintenance effort are automatically calculated using three different estimation techniques - COCOMO, Function Point, and Component AnalysisIn the third phase, a product breakdown tree is designed to obtain the elementary results. Corresponding to this result tree, an activity tree is generated which includes an activity for each desired result - module. data capsule, document, test procedure, etc. It is then transformed into a network for computing the activity dependencies and the critical path using the MPM methodIn the fourth phase. the project progress is monitored in terms of quantity of results produced, quality of results obtained, time spent and cost accrued. Deviations from the plan are automatically reported and the differences documentedproduct status database together with their quality assessment on a scale of 0:1 ratio of achieved quality to desired quality. Components are also given a version number, a completion date and a configuration status. Incoming error reports and change requests are accumulated and their relationships to the software components established. These are then aggregated and transformed into requirements so as to close the cycle and initiate a new project.