17spm_T05
Software Project Management
SPM 2017 Tutorial 5 1 © 2017 Ron Poet
Tutorial 5
This is a role-playing tutorial in which you act out various aspects of managing a
waterfall style project. Form teams of 4 or 5 from fellow students sitting near you. The
project you will work on is defined as follows:
Deliver a system to maintain student records at a university. It will have roughly 20,000
new students each year. The system must be delivered in 2 years’ time.
I have chosen this project because, as students, you are familiar with most of the
functionality. It is not important whether you get the functional details right, this tutorial
is about understanding the process. However, try and be as realistic as possible to make
the exercise interesting. It is good if you have differences of opinion, since differences
will have to be resolved well in a real life project. Arrive at a consensus for the following
document.
Write down your decisions, but don’t make them too wordy.
1. Decide on which form of waterfall style of approach you are going to use, and
assign roles to each of you. You will need to decide on the style of team structure
to use.
2. Your first job is to form your teams and you have the following people available
(among others):
Alice: a very experienced developer who has also managed several smaller projects using
Scrum (an agile approach).
Bob: has worked for the company for a number of years, mainly building small websites
for a variety of customers. He is looking for a new role now that the company has
cut down on this type of work.
Carol: used to be a developer a long time ago but has been a manager for long enough to
forget how to code. She is very good at working with people, both developers and
customers.
Dave: a sharp developer who has been with the company for a few months. He knows
everything there is to know about PRINCE2 (a waterfall style approach).
What roles would you give them and why?
3. Divide your project into around 15 major activities. These are not use cases!
Produce estimates (they don’t have to be realistic) for each task, making sure that
the total effort is around 300 person-months. Produce elapsed times for each task.
Sketch a rough PERT chart.
4. Bring your documents to this afternoon’s tutorial and stay in the same teams.
Software Project Management
SPM 2017 Tutorial 5 2 © 2017 Ron Poet
Part 2
5. Pass your documents to another group and receive the documents from another
group. Try to make them different groups if you can. Read the other group’s
documents and add helpful comments where necessary. Decide as a team what you
should add.
6. Get your own documents back and rewrite them if necessary, based on the
comments from the other group.
7. We will then discuss this exercise.