ISBN : 978-81-963532-2-3 (E-Book) PROJECTSCHEDULING Project-task schedulingis an important projectplanning activity.It involves deciding whichtasks would be taken up when. In order to schedule the project activities, a software projectmanagerneeds to do thefollowing: 1. Identifyallthe tasksneeded tocompletetheproject. 2. Breakdownlargetasksintosmall activities. 3. Determinethe dependencyamongdifferentactivities. 4. Establishthemostlikelyestimatesforthetimedurationsnecessarytocompletetheactivities. 5. Allocateresourcesto activities. 6. Planthestartingandendingdatesforvarious activities. 7. Determinethecriticalpath.Acriticalpathisthechainofactivitiesthatdeterminesthedurationo fthe project. The first step in scheduling a software project involves identifying all the tasks necessary tocomplete the project. A good knowledge of the intricacies of the project and the developmentprocess helps the managers to effectively identify the important tasks of the project. Next, thelarge tasks are broken down into a logical set of small activities which would be assigned todifferent engineers. The work breakdown structure formalism helps the manager to breakdownthetaskssystematicallyaftertheprojectmanagerhasbrokendownthetasksandcreatedthewo rk breakdown structure, he has to find the dependency among the activities. Dependencyamong the different activities determines the order in which the different activities would becarried out. If an activity A requires the results of another activity B, then activity A must bescheduled after activity B. In general, the task dependencies define a partial ordering amongtasks, i.e. each tasks may precede a subset of other tasks, but some tasks might not have anyprecedence ordering defined between them (called concurrent task). The dependency among theactivitiesisrepresented in theform ofanactivitynetwork. Once the activity network representation has been worked out, resources are allocated to eachactivity. Resource allocation is typically done using a Gantt chart. After resource allocation isdone, a PERT chart representation is developed. The PERT chart representation is suitable forprogram monitoring and control. For task scheduling, the project manager needs to decomposetheprojecttasksintoasetofactivities.Thetimeframewheneachactivityistobeperformedisto be determined. The end of each activity is called milestone. The project manager tracks 176 Software Engineering Keerthana P, Manasa KN, Ganga D Bengal
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