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CHAPTER

7 PROJECT SCHEDULING AND
TRACKING

KEY n the late 1960s, a bright-eyed young engineer was chosen to "write" a com-
CONCEPTS puter program for an automated manufacturing application. The reason for
adaptation Ihis selection was simple. He was the only person in his technical group who
criteria . . . . . . . . 174
had attended a computer programming seminar. He knew the ins and outs of
critical path. . . . . 181 assembly language and FORTRAN but nothing about software engineering and
earned value . . . 186 even less about project scheduling and tracking.
error tracking. . . 187 His boss gave him the appropriate manuals and a verbal description of what
lateness . . . . . . . 166 had to be done. He was informed that the project must be completed in two
people and effort170 months.
He read the manuals, considered his approach, and began writing code.
project plan . . . . 189
After two weeks, the boss called him into his office and asked how things were
project tracking . 185
going.
scheduling "Really great," said the young engineer with youthful enthusiasm, "This was
principles . . . . . . 168
much simpler than I thought. I'm probably close to 75 percent finished."
task network. . . 180
The boss smiled. "That's really terrific," he said, encouraging the young
task set . . . . . . . 172
engineer to keep up the good work. They planned to meet again in a week’s
timeline chart. . . 182 time.
work breakdown A week later the boss called the engineer into his office and asked, "Where
structure. . . . . . . 181
are we?"

QUICK What is it? You’ve selected ware engineers. At an individual level, software
LOOK an appropriate process model, engineers themselves.
you’ve identified the software Why is it important? In order to build a complex sys-
engineering tasks that have to be performed, you tem, many software engineering tasks occur in
estimated the amount of work and the number of parallel, and the result of work performed during
people, you know the deadline, you’ve even con- one task may have a profound effect on work to
sidered the risks. Now it’s time to connect the dots. be conducted in another task. These interdepen-
That is, you have to create a network of software dencies are very difficult to understand without a
engineering tasks that will enable you to get the schedule. lt’s also virtually impossible to assess
job done on time. Once the network is created, progress on a moderate or large software project
you have to assign responsibility for each task, without a detailed schedule.
make sure it gets done, and adapt the network as What are the steps? The software engineering
risks become reality. In a nutshell, that’s software tasks dictated by the software process model are
project scheduling and tracking. refined for the functionality to be built. Effort and
Who does it? At the project level, software proj-ect duration are allocated to each task and a task
managers using information solicited from soft- network (also called an “activity network”) is

165