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         Communication Aspects in Software Engineering

27 March 2010

Earned Value and Tolerance, using critical path

Filed under: Project Management — Tags: — admin @ 09:09

When reporting on earned value, more often than not, the project is slightly behind the original plan and the earned value is below the planned value.
How does the project manager and the project stakeholders know if the variance is within the tolerance of the project or not? What is the bottom-line?…

The project critical path can be used, in order to represent the tolerance threshold, as in the example below.

Values for the chart can be automated using MS Project and MS Excel… See previous post on earned value calculation http://www.casoft.com.au/2009/04/calculate-earned-value-with-tfs.html

For more information contact us – jjacquet AT casoft.com.au

7 March 2010

Waterfall, Iterative or Agile?

Filed under: Project Management — Tags: — admin @ 16:33

With a waterfall approach, one wants to have as close as possible to 100% of the requirements up-front. The challenge in this case is fairly obvious. Getting 100% of requirements documented on a fairly complex system is no easy task and is rarely achieved in practice.

With an iterative approach, I will kick-off the development with 80% of the requirements up-front. Knowing Paretto’s (80%-20%) rule, it makes a lot of sense! The rest of the requirements can be elicited during the development, and a lot of time can be saved this way.

If an Agile approach is to be implemented, I will start the development with less than 20% of the requirements and the scope being defined. In this case, on basically unearth the requirements by putting prototypes in front of the Customer and getting feedback. The prototypes are refined as the development goes, and become an application overtime.

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