Page 207 -

178 PART TWO MANAGING SOFTWARE PROJECTS

FIGURE 7.1
Project Engineering/ Customer
Concept definition Planning construction Release evaluation
development
tasks in a Concept development
linear
1.1 Concept scoping 1.4 Proof of concept 1.6 Customer reaction
sequential
model
1.2 Preliminary concept planning 1.5 Concept implementation
1.3 Technology risk assessment
New application
development projects
Application
enhancement projects
Application
maintenance
Reengineering

It is important to note that concept development framework activities are itera-
tive in nature. That is, an actual concept development project might approach these
activities in a number of planned increments, each designed to produce a deliverable
that can be evaluated by the customer.
If a linear process model flow is chosen, each of these increments is defined in a
repeating sequence as illustrated in Figure 7.1. During each sequence, umbrella activ-
ities (described in Chapter 2) are applied; quality is monitored; and at the end of each
sequence, a deliverable is produced. With each iteration, the deliverable should con-
verge toward the defined end product for the concept development stage. If an evo-
lutionary model is chosen, the layout of tasks 1.1 through 1.6 would appear as shown
in Figure 7.2. Major software engineering tasks for other project types can be defined
and applied in a similar manner.

7.5 REFINEMENT OF MAJOR TASKS
The major tasks described in Section 7.4 may be used to define a macroscopic
schedule for a project. However, the macroscopic schedule must be refined to
create a detailed project schedule. Refinement begins by taking each major task
and decomposing it into a set of subtasks (with related work products and mile-
stones).
As an example of task decomposition, consider concept scoping for a development
project, discussed in Section 7.4. Task refinement can be accomplished using an out-
line format, but in this book, a process design language approach is used to illustrate
the flow of the concept scoping activity: