Background:
You work for a small software house that develops, among other products,
web sites that are used for simple business-to-business transactions.
E.g. checking the status of an order, creating an order, etc.
These projects include plenty of code writing and database work, but not much
graphic design work. Being a small shop, most employees wear
multiple hats.
Your Job:
This is your first project to run. While you can draw on any of the
employees above, you can't just grab someone the day that you need them.
They need to know when you will need them to work on your project. They
spend much of their time doing maintenance on existing products, which
is the chief revenue stream of the company. They must be able to schedule
their work in order to insure that customers' maintenance is completed when promised.
You have two priorities when building this schedule: short and cheap. Of course, also try to build a good system. We will have to maintain this thing for the next couple of years.
This is a pretty informally run office. People are pretty friendly and understand the need to be flexible. Feel free to be creative in building your work schedule. But, also be prepared to justify your decisions.
| Work Breakdown Structure Task ID
| Task Name
| Dependent on Task
| Expected Duration | (in Person Days) Task Description
| 1
| Requirements Analysis
|
|
|
| 1.1
| Initial Requirements
| -
| 2-3 | First talks with customer. Probably only a couple of mid-level managers.
Done at customer's offices. | 1.2
| Paper Prototype
| 1.1
| 2
| Create some drawings of all the pages. Maybe include Use Cases.
| 1.3
| Detailed Requirements
| 1.2
| 2-4
| Use the paper prototypes to get detailed feedback from the experts and users at the customer's location.
|
| 2
| Development
|
|
|
| 2.1 | Create Web Pages
| 1.3 | 0.5 to 1 day per page
| Build the HTML and JavaScript pages. Probably 20 pages, of which probably 15 can be versions of stuff that we already have developed. This task can easily be divided up among several people.
| 2.2 | Graphics
| 1.3 | 2-5
| Design and build appropriate graphics.
| 2.3 | Database
| 1.3 | 2-8
| Build the underlying database tables and queries.
|
| 3
| Full Demo
| 2
| 1
| Milestone progress check. Done at our location. Includes our managers, their managers, and a select few of their domain experts.
|
| 4
| Rework and Testing
|
|
|
| 4.1
| Various Modifications
| 3
| 2-10
| Modify the database, graphics, and html pages based on input from customer. Time to complete depends on
amount of rework to be done.
| 4.1.1 | Customer Review
| 4.1
| 0 or 1
| Pending the outcome of the Mid-Project Review, the customer may want a brief check of the system after most of the modifications have been completed.
| 4.2
| System Testing
| 4.1 | 2
| Stress test and security test the system on our server. We have a good suite of tools to do most of this.
|
| 5
| Wrap Up
|
|
|
| 5.1
| Installation
| 4 | 2
| Install everything on the customer's server and make sure it works.
| 5.2
| Code Revisions
| 4
| 1-3
| Plug any security holes and/or fix the database to handle the real network
performance/load.
| 5.3 | Release
| 5.1 and 5.2
| 0
| Customer signs off on acceptance.
| | ||||||||||||||||||||