Project Planning And Methodology

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Introduction:

In order to get the desired level of success in the development of a project, the project planning and appropriate methodology selection is very important. The project of developing an e-procurement system for the Museums Victoria is a software system development project.  This project would be completed by following the waterfall model of the software development. In other words, the traditional steps of the software development life cycle (SDLC) would be followed by the project manager for the development of the e-procure system.

In this report, the different stages of the chosen methodology have been described in details with the specific activities of the project development work in each of the selected stages. The methodology chosen for this project has been aligned with the declared milestones of the project.

Description of the methodology:

The waterfall model is the first and traditional software development model, which is also known as the linear-sequential life cycle model. This is one of the simplest software development model, which is very easy to understand and use in the practical field. This type of methodology is generally used in the simple project which don’t have any uncertain steps (Schwalbe 2015). In this case, the project has some specific stages and all the milestones are clearly described in the previous report. Based on the case scenario and the milestones of the projects, the waterfall model has been selected as the appropriate method for the project work of e-procure system development (Kerzner 2013).

Figure 1: Steps of water fall model

(Source: Pathak and Saha 2013)

The pictorial representation of the chosen methodology of the project management work has been given in the above figure. All the stages of the method have been given in the figure. These steps would be followed for performing the whole project of the e-procure management system and completing the declared milestones of the project.

Requirement gathering and analysis

This is the preliminary stage of project management work. In this stages the basics details regarding the background of the project have been gathered for developing the project scope and specifications. This step has already done at the starting of the project. The background details of the project have been collected and the tender report has been produced. Through the requirement gathering and analysis phase, the project manager understood the deliverables of the project (Mohammadi et al. 2015).  In more simple words, the requirements of the new e-procure management system have been understood by collecting the details existing software and the status of the procure management system of Museum Victoria. Interview with the project owners have been conducted for completing the activities of this step. After completing this step the project scope and the milestone of the project have been developed (Highsmith 2013).

Stakeholder management is another part of this step of the methodology. The stakeholder management is generally divided into two sub activities; stakeholder analysis and communication plan. Stakeholder analysis refers to the identification of all the stakeholders of the project and ensure that all the project stakeholders would be benefited from the outcome of the project. In this phase the polls of all the stakeholders have been gathered (Dubois and Tamburrelli 2013).

After the stakeholder management plan, a communication plan would be developed in this phase. This plan is for ensuring that all the stakeholders are kept involve based on their needs and interests. 

Based on the information gathering of the project, the requirement and analysis phase needs to collect two types of requirements; they are functional requirements and non-functional requirements. Functional requirements are the use cases or user scenarios for interacting with the new system (Papadopoulos 2015). These use cases are described in more details in the design phase of the project management. Non-functional requirements are the software and hardware components required for the development and use of the new system to be developed in this project. In this context, the project manager should ensure that the performance characteristics of the solution need to be met (Moniruzzaman and Hossain 2013).

The necessities investigation and documentation is in a perfect world not a direct procedure, as the group ought to meet with the partners a few times amid the prerequisites stage and present to them their present comprehension of the necessities for the answer for gather input and conceivably missing necessities. Models or screen mockups are regularly helpful to guarantee that the partners and the group have a similar translation of the necessities. Frequently the partners' prerequisites advance amid the necessities exchange, as the dialog turns out to be more concrete (Papadopoulos 2015). Particularly amid the waterfall approach it is essential that the prerequisites are totally caught and conceded to before the group moves to the plan stage, as each new or changing necessity implies that the group needs to backpedal to the prerequisites stage, which may negate work that was at that point done in a before stage.

In this phase, the existing IT infrastructure of the user organizations would be checked for supporting the newly developed system. If there is anything that needs to modified or updated then the project manager needs to document it properly and take approval from the project owner (Schwalbe 2015).

After combing all the details regarding the background of the project, the detailed project schedule would be developed (Raval and Rathod 2014). In the project schedule, the starting and end date of each of the activities of the project, resource allocation and budget would be given in details.

System design

This is the phase where the detailed design of the complete system would be developed. Each of the individual components of the system would be described in this phase. This would be done in such a level, where the developer can directly translate the designs into required codes in the next phase (Dubois and Tamburrelli 2013). The different types of activities and components of this phase are discussed in the next section.

Use case development – The high level use cases would be developed in this phase. The use cases would describe the interaction and behavior of the system with the users of the system or the others systems. Separate use cases would be developed for each of the interaction with the system (Papadopoulos 2015). In this step, the user stories would be defined, which are not actually components of classical or traditional waterfall model. In this case, the agile approach of the software development would be mixed with the waterfall approach (Schwalbe 2015).

Flowchart development –

Flowchart would be developed after the development of the use case. This would describe the flow of information and the processes of the new system. The flow charts would be built using the following basic components:

Start and end – Each of the flow charts would have a start element for indicating that the process is starting. Similarly the end element would describe the ending of the process.

Processing steps – rectangle shape boxes would be used in the flow chart for indicating the processes of the system.

Arrows – The flow direction would be shown through the arrows in the flowchart of the e-procure management system.

Decision points – The decision points would be used in the flowcharts for indicating the conditional checkpoints of the system.

Input / Output – Parallelogram shape boxes would be used in the flowcharts for indicting the read/write operations.

After the development of the use cases and flowcharts of the system, the developers would directly implement the code for the design of the system.

Implementation

Since the plan is done and idealize (at any rate it should be seen as impeccable), it is converted into code. Engineers take the flowcharts, UML charts, and the other plan archives and make an interpretation of them into code, segment by part or question by protest. Every part is unit-tried all alone and a code survey ought to be finished. Normally the reconciliation is done toward the finish of the coding stage or toward the start of the test stage (Highsmith 2013). This is regularly the ideal opportunity for amazements, as things may not fit or cooperate as arranged, and the group may need to backpedal to the outline stage to roll out the fitting improvements. Contingent upon how intense the calendar was, the venture may get in a bad position comfortable point, as the arrangement was to coordinate the parts to frame a superbly working framework. Yet, now there is a deferral because of the coordination issues (Moniruzzaman and Hossain 2013). The danger of a major astonishment toward the end can be lessened by presenting distinctive turning points amid the coding stage, and soon thereafter in time the framework is coordinated and needs to give a specific level of usefulness. These breakthroughs ought to in a perfect world be trailed by an arrangement of tests to check that the usefulness works accurately.

Testing

This is the phase, where the developed system would be checked for the efficiency. The developer would first check the system for understanding whether the system is able to the meet the specification of the project. According to Dubois and Tamburrelli (2013), the goal of the testing phase is to identify the bugs of the system. In the first phase of the testing the testing team would check for the bugs by themselves. Different types of test case scenarios would be used for testing the system. After fixing the identified bugs, the system would be tested from the user ends. The various types of testing that would be performed are Integration & function verification test, Globalization verification test, System verification test, Performance verification test and Acceptance test (Mohammadi et al. 2015).  In case any problem found from the user ends, then again the modification would be done at the designers end.  The e-procure system for the Museum Victoria would not be completely developed until there is no more defects in the develop software system.

Deployment of system

After the complete development of the system, i.e., testing and modifying the system, the e-procure system would be installed in the practical environment. In this case, the e-procure management system would be installed into the computer systems of the Museum Victoria. In this phase, the deployment team of the developer organization would install the system into the computers of the users (Pathak and Saha 2013). If there is any up-gradations required in the existing computer systems or IT environment of the users, then the deployment team would fix this first. The approval for this need to be taken form the owner at the initial level.

Maintenance

This is the after installation service, which is usually known as the support phase. This phase should start immediately after the hand over the e-procure management system. The responsibilities of the support service are handed over to a support team from the developer and tester team (Dubois and Tamburrelli 2013). Generally call centers are there for providing supports to the big projects. In this case, a support team would be available for the support services of the e-procure management system. The specialists of the support team would be developed by several professionals with deep knowledge regarding the system.

Conclusion:

The project development would be completed within the time and budget declared at the initial phase. As the milestones of the project were declared at the beginning level of the project work, the waterfall model would be efficient enough for completion the project of the development of e-procure management system for Museum Victoria. However, some agile approaches would also be used for the project development as discussed in this report. Although the pictorial representation of the classical waterfall model indicates the step by step approach one after another, sometimes the loop would be required for the project management of the e-procure system development.

References:

Dubois, D.J. and Tamburrelli, G., 2013, August. Understanding gamification mechanisms for software development. In Proceedings of the 2013 9th Joint Meeting on Foundations of Software Engineering (pp. 659-662). ACM.

Highsmith, J., 2013. Adaptive software development: a collaborative approach to managing complex systems. Addison-Wesley.

Kerzner, H., 2013. Project management: a systems approach to planning, scheduling, and controlling. John Wiley & Sons.

Kumar, G. and Bhatia, P.K., 2014, February. Comparative analysis of software engineering models from traditional to modern methodologies. In Advanced Computing & Communication Technologies (ACCT), 2014 Fourth International Conference on (pp. 189-196). IEEE.

Mohammadi, N.G., Bandyszak, T., Paulus, S., Meland, P.H., Weyer, T. and Pohl, K., 2015. Extending Software Development Methodologies to Support Trustworthiness-by-Design. In CAiSE Forum (pp. 213-220).

Moniruzzaman, A.B.M. and Hossain, D.S.A., 2013. Comparative study on agile software development methodologies. arXiv preprint arXiv:1307.3356.

Papadopoulos, G., 2015. Moving from Traditional to Agile Software Development Methodologies Also on Large, Distributed Projects. Procedia-Social and Behavioral Sciences, 175, pp.455-463.

Pathak, K. and Saha, A., 2013. Review of agile software development methodologies. International Journal, 3(2).

Raval, R.R. and Rathod, H.M., 2014. Improvements in Agile Model using Hybrid Theory for Software Development in Software Engineering. International Journal of Computer Applications, 90(16).