Newspaper Delivery System

Project Management Report

Aaron Molloy, James Kenny, Taras Voloshyn

B.Sc. Software Engineering Year 4

November, 2013
Project Management Assignment Software Dev. 4 Aaron Molloy, Jimmy Kenny, Taras Voloshyn

Newspaper Delivery System

Project Management Report

compiled by

Aaron Molloy (A00172521)

Jimmy Kenny (A00177486)
Taras Voloshyn (A00174389)

B.Sc. Software Engineering Year 4

November, 2013

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Project Management Assignment Software Dev. 4 Aaron Molloy, Jimmy Kenny, Taras Voloshyn

Contents

Glossary of Terms.......................................................................................................................................3

Introduction ...............................................................................................................................................4

Project Organization ..................................................................................................................................6

Risk Analysis ...............................................................................................................................................7

Hardware and Software Resource Requirements .....................................................................................9

Work Breakdown Structure .....................................................................................................................10

Project Scheduling ...................................................................................................................................15

Monitoring and Reporting .......................................................................................................................22

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Project Management Assignment Software Dev. 4 Aaron Molloy, Jimmy Kenny, Taras Voloshyn

Glossary of Terms

AJAX – A technique for creating fast and dynamic web pages

Cloud Service – Computer services provided to customers over the Internet

Critical Path - The sequence of dependent steps that determine the minimum time needed to
carry out an operation

Eclipse – An Integrated Development Environment used for Software Development

GIT – Repository used for version control

Javascript - A programming language

MySQL – A database management system

PHP – A programming language

V-model — one of the models which defines processes and their order within software
development lifecycle. This model is based around continuous testing all the way through the
project.

WBS — Work Breakdown Structure

Xampp - Open source cross-platform web server solution stack package

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Project Management Assignment Software Dev. 4 Aaron Molloy, Jimmy Kenny, Taras Voloshyn

Introduction

Purpose of the Document

The purpose of this report is to outline the various project management considerations that we will
undertake in designing the Newspaper Delivery Service. The report will detail:

 System Overview – A short description of the project requirements

 Project Organisation - List of the roles required to undertake the project
 Risk Analysis – An analysis of the risks involved in the project
 Resource Requirements – Details of the Hardware and Software resources required to
undertake the project.
 Work Breakdown Structure – A diagrammatic breakdown of the work involved in bringing the
project to completion.
 Project Schedule – A schedule of every aspect of the project detailing the timeframes involved
in Requirement Elicitation, Design, Implementation and Testing.
 Monitoring and Reporting mechanisms – Details of how the project will be monitored and
reported.

System Overview
This Newspaper Delivery System is intended to manage the delivery of newspapers and magazines in
a small town or area of a larger town. It is intended for use by newsagents who are only casual users
of computer systems and should run on a PC or similar hardware.

Factors which should be taken into account in specifying and designing this system are:
• For each delivery person, the system must print, each day, the publications to be delivered to
each address.
• The system should also print, for the newsagent, a summary of who received what
publications each day.
• Once a month, bills are delivered to customers along with their newspapers. These bills should
be computed automatically by the system.
• Customers come and go and may be away temporarily on holiday or on business.
• Not all customers necessarily have a delivery every day.
• The system should be able to manage some simple geographic information so that it prints
information for the delivery person in the order in which publications are delivered.

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Project Management Assignment Software Dev. 4 Aaron Molloy, Jimmy Kenny, Taras Voloshyn

It was decided to design the system as a web application hosted by a cloud service for the following
reasons:

 Our skillsets lay mostly in the web development area.

 A requirement for the system that it would be used by newsagents who are only casual users
of computers. We therefore felt that a web application would be easier for the newsagent to
use and more intuitive to learn.

 A web application gives greater accessibility.

 A system hosted by a cloud service would be easier and more efficient for backup and security
purposes.

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Project Management Assignment Software Dev. 4 Aaron Molloy, Jimmy Kenny, Taras Voloshyn

Project Organization

The project will be undertaken by a three man team comprising of Aaron Molloy, Jimmy Kenny and
Taras Voloshyn. Mike Russell will act as the Project Manager and the team will periodically report
progress or any serious issues to him.
Each team member shall share responsibility for Requirements, Design, Implementation, Testing,
Integration and Deployment of the system but will be specifically responsible for the following
features of the system:
 Customer Details and Printing Functions – Aaron Molloy

 Geographical Information and Summary Functions – Jimmy Kenny

 Database and Billing Functions – Taras Voloshyn

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Project Management Assignment Software Dev. 4 Aaron Molloy, Jimmy Kenny, Taras Voloshyn

Risk Analysis

Probability of Occurrence
The Risk Exposure values in the table above were calculated from two other values: Probability of
Occurrence and the Consequences of Occurrence measures. The metrics for the Probability of
Occurrence calculations were chosen because they increase evenly from low to high which makes it
easier to assign probability factors to our risks. As you can see, we have used 20% increments for each
measure. The reason we didn’t use a more detailed measurement (e.g. 1%) was due to the complexity
it would introduce when deciding what the probability of each risk with consideration to the type of
system we are developing.

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Project Management Assignment Software Dev. 4 Aaron Molloy, Jimmy Kenny, Taras Voloshyn

Consequences of Occurrence
The table below details the metrics used for the Consequences of Occurrence evaluations.

 Insignificant — something that will not affect project development.

 Tolerable — something that affects development of a project at some level (e.g. Requirements
Change, Staff getting sick).
 Serious —something that might significantly influence scheduling and project development
(e.g. Lack of knowledge).
 Critical — something that might cause project development to freeze (which also affects
scheduling) for example misunderstanding of the requirements or hardware failure.
 Catastrophic — project might not be completed at all (e.g. Data loss, budget cuts).

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Project Management Assignment Software Dev. 4 Aaron Molloy, Jimmy Kenny, Taras Voloshyn

Hardware and Software Resource Requirements

Hardware Requirements:

 PC x 3
 Printer
 Internet Connection

Software Requirements:

 Eclipse with JUnit plugin shall be used to develop and test the project.
 MySQL shall be used to develop the database required for the project.
 Google Maps integration shall be used to find out where customers are located.
 PHP shall be used in the development of the project.
 Xampp
 JavaScript
 AJAX/JSON
 Microsoft Office Excel shall be used to organize and input users billing information.
 Microsoft Office Word shall be used to write up the requirements document.
 HTML
 CSS shall be used to design the look of the application.
 GIT shall be used to manage the changes to the project.

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Project Management Assignment Software Dev. 4 Aaron Molloy, Jimmy Kenny, Taras Voloshyn

Work Breakdown Structure

In order to do a WBS, we had to choose a software development model for our project. Due to
amount of sensitive data (Customer details etc.) that would be handled by the system, we decided
that we should devote as much time as possible to the testing phases of the development particularly
with regard to security of data. We decided to use the V-model as we believed that this would be
more suitable in addressing those concerns.
So our WBS was based around phases of the V-model such as the different levels for Requirements,
Design, Implementation and Testing. We also found it necessary to have some preparation and post
analysis within the company so we can split the roles and gather necessary metrics afterwards. For
the actual WBS, a top-down approach was used which was more logical to us, as we didn’t know at
the time all the possible underlying tasks we might have.

Requirements

In-house
Preparation

High Level Design

Unit/Module
Design

Implementation

Newspaper
Unit Testing
Delivery System

Integration
Testing

System Testing

User Acceptance
Test

In-house analysis

Project
Monitoring
Overall Work Breakdown Structure

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Project Management Assignment Software Dev. 4 Aaron Molloy, Jimmy Kenny, Taras Voloshyn

Prepare questions

Interviews Organize time

User Req. Req. Analysis Interview

Design of UAT
cases
Requirements
System req.
meeting

System Req. Req. Analysis

Design of system
test cases
Requirements Work Breakdown Structure

Role splitting

In-house Pick testing

Preparation strategy

Set up required
tools
In-house Preparation Work Breakdown Structure

Design of system
architecture
High Level Design
Integration test
cases design
High Level Design Work Breakdown Structure

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Project Management Assignment Software Dev. 4 Aaron Molloy, Jimmy Kenny, Taras Voloshyn

Design printing module

and test cases

Design summary module

and test cases

Design billing module and

test cases
Unit/Module Design
Design customer settings
module and test cases

Design geo info module

and test cases

Design of Database

Unit/Module Work Breakdown Structure

Implementing Database
module

Implementing printing
module

Implementing summary
module
Implementing
Implementing billing
module

Implementing custoemr
settings module

Implementing geo info

module
Implementation Work Breakdown Structure

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Project Management Assignment Software Dev. 4 Aaron Molloy, Jimmy Kenny, Taras Voloshyn

Test printing
module

Test summary
module

Test billing module

Test customer
settings module
Unit Testing
Test geo infro
module

Analysis of test
results

Error fixing

Final test
execution
Unit Testing Work Breakdown Structure

Execution of test
cases

Analysis of test
results
Integration Testing
Error fixing

Final test
execution
Integration Work Breakdown Structure

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Project Management Assignment Software Dev. 4 Aaron Molloy, Jimmy Kenny, Taras Voloshyn

Execution of test
cases

Analysis of test
results
System Testing
Error fixing

Final test
execution
System Testing Work Breakdown Structure

Full system installation

and configuration

System demonstration

User Acceptance Meething with

Testing customers

Beta system testing

with real users

Final Acceptance
Meeting
User Acceptance Testing Work Breakdown Structure

Define/Update processes
employed
In-house analysis
Gather necessary metrics
(i.e test cases failure reate)

In-house Work Breakdown Structure

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Project Management Assignment Software Dev. 4 Aaron Molloy, Jimmy Kenny, Taras Voloshyn

Project Scheduling

Overall structure
We used Microsoft Project to schedule our project. The structure was dictated by the Software
Development Model we chose – the V model. From the figure below it can be seen that project is
scheduled to take 130 days but we have also built in 10 days for Contingency. Over these 130 days the
project will be overseen by Mike Russell, the Project Manager.

Requirements
Requirements is scheduled to take 16 man days and 15 actual working days. Two tasks run
concurrently with the rest running consecutively.

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Project Management Assignment Software Dev. 4 Aaron Molloy, Jimmy Kenny, Taras Voloshyn

In-house Preparation
This phase will take 3 working days with all tasks running consecutively.

High-Level Design
The High-Level Design phase will take 5 days with both tasks running consecutively.

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Project Management Assignment Software Dev. 4 Aaron Molloy, Jimmy Kenny, Taras Voloshyn

Unit/Module Design
This phase will take a total of 6 actual working days and 18 man days because there are two occasions
when the three team members are working concurrently on tasks which take 3 days to complete. The
start and end date of the concurrent tasks are the same (this type of scheduling will have an effect on
the determination of the critical path of the project)

Implementation
This Implementation is an important phase and takes 28 working days and 73 man days because of
tasks being done concurrently.

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Unit Testing
Unit Testing is allocated 48 days because as previously stated rigorous testing is a priority when
designing a system that will deal with sensitive personal data. The actual number of man days slotted
is 90.

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Project Management Assignment Software Dev. 4 Aaron Molloy, Jimmy Kenny, Taras Voloshyn

Concurrency (Implementation and Testing)

The diagram below shows how the Implementation and Testing phases run concurrently

Integration Testing
The Integration Testing phase will take 8 working days. The tasks in this phase are all consecutive with
each task being dependant on the previous.

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Project Management Assignment Software Dev. 4 Aaron Molloy, Jimmy Kenny, Taras Voloshyn

System Test
System testing will take 12 consecutive working days with each task having a dependency on the
previous one.

Use Acceptance Test

This phase of testing takes place over 20 consecutive working days with each task having a
dependency on the previous one.

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Project Management Assignment Software Dev. 4 Aaron Molloy, Jimmy Kenny, Taras Voloshyn

In-House Analysis
The In-House Analysis phase will take 3 working days or 4 man days as the two tasks run concurrently.

The Critical Path

When drawing up a schedule for the management of the project we decided to run concurrent tasks
over the same timeframes. As a result there are no divergent paths through the project and
consequently the Critical Path is the only path and runs for 130 days.

Milestones and Deliverables

We set Milestones to correspond to the end of each phase of the project based on the V-model.
When each milestone is reached we will assess the progress of the project up to that point. The
milestones are as follows:
 Requirements Elicitation and User Acceptance Test
 Requirements Analysis and System Testing
 High Level Design and Integration Testing
 Unit/Module Design and Unit/Module Testing
 Implementation

Deliverables are the work products we will give the client for evaluation. The deliverables are as follows:
 Project Plan
 Requirements Document
 Design Document
 Executable Code Modules
 Integrated Modules for testing
 User Manual

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Project Management Assignment Software Dev. 4 Aaron Molloy, Jimmy Kenny, Taras Voloshyn

Monitoring and Reporting

Throughout the course of the project we will implement Monitoring and Reporting mechanisms as
follows:
 Each week there will be informal team meetings to discuss the status of the project and any issues that need
addressing.

 When each Milestone is reached a formal report will be written and submitted to the Project Manager. This
report will detail what was done during that particular phase and highlight any actual or potential problems
(e.g. budgetary or project implementation). A formal meeting will be held with the Project Manager and the
team to discuss the report. Follow-up meetings may be required.
 When a Deliverable is ready a report will be written and both will be handed to the Client. A formal meeting
will then be arranged to discuss with the Client any issues arising. Follow-up meetings may be required.

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