Overview

For a successful project, both good project management and good engineering are essential. Lack of either one can cause a project to fail. We have seen that project management activities can be viewed as having three major phases: project planning, project monitoring and control, and project termination. Broadly speaking, planning entails all activities that must be performed before starting the development work. Once the project is started, project control begins. In other words, during planning all the activities that management needs to perform are planned, while during project control the plan is executed and updated.

Planning may be the most important management activity. Without a proper plan, no real monitoring or controlling of the project is possible. Often projects are rushed toward implementation with not enough time and effort spent on planning. No amount of technical effort later can compensate for lack of careful planning. Lack of proper planing is a sure ticket to failure for a large software project. For this reason, we treat project planning as an independent chapter.

The basic goal of planning is to look into the future, identify the activities that need to be done to complete the project successfully, and plan the scheduling and resources. The inputs to the planning activity are the requirements specification and the architecture description. A very detailed requirements document is not essential for planning, but for a good plan all the important requirements must be known, and it is highly desirable that architecture decisions have been taken. The...