Software Project Planning, Importance, Purpose and Involved Steps: The Software Project Planning can be defined as a task in the project management, which includes a collection of several operations to ensure the successful completion of the project. The operational portion includes defining, integrate, coordinate and preparing of the additional plans. The main mission of the project planning is to define how the project will be controlled, monitored, executed and closed. Project planning makes sure that all the elements of the project coordinates in a good manner.

The planning of the project is performed before the start of the software production. However, it will be there for the production of the software, but doesn’t include any concrete activities that will any direct connection with it. It is generally a set of multiple processes to simply the software production.

Software Project Planning, Importance, Purpose and Involved Steps

So that was Software Project Planning, further in this article, We will talk about the importance, purpose and steps involved in Software Projects Planning.

Importance of the Software Project Planning

For success of any project, the project planning plays a vital role. It is important to plan carefully from the start of the project, so that the costly mistakes can be avoided. It offers a guarantee that the execution of the project will achieve its goal within the budget.

The project planning assists in the facilitating communication and monitoring the progress of the project. It also helps in offering overall documentation of the planning decisions. It is an ongoing effort throughout the life cycle of the project.  

Purpose of the Software Project Planning

In software engineering, the main motive of the project planning is to identify the project scope, work estimation and creation of a project schedule. All the tasks that will lead to the completion of the project are described in this planning.

Steps involving in the Software Project Planning

The project planning involves different steps in order to deliver the software of a suitable quality and features.

Software Project Planning
Software Project Planning
  1. Project Scope Definition: The documentation of the project work is done in the first step that include assumptions, user expectations, technical requirements, project objectives, business requirement and everything else, that defines the requirements of the final product.
  1. Project Activity and Sequencing: All the specific activities that need to be performed to develop the software is defined in this step and the sequencing part identifies the interdependence of all the activities on each other.
  1. Time, Effort and Resource Elimination: The next important step in the software project planning is to determine the effort need to complete all the activities. There are lots of techniques such as lines of code, complexity of code, function points and much more can be used to calculate the effort. In this step, the time, effort and resource will be determined clearly for each activity.
  1. Cost Estimation and Budgeting: After collecting all the information of the various steps, the estimation of cost, including implementing and executing project can be done easily. The allocation of the budget can be done on the basis of the cost estimation. The size of the software is estimated in terms of Kilo Line of Code or by calculation of numbers of function points in it. The Line of code depends on the coding practices, whereas the Function points vary as per user requirement. While estimating the cost of the project, the points such as size of software, hardware, software quality, additional software and skilled personnel involved.
  1. Risk Management and Planning: In this step, the process of identification, analysis and response to the risk is performed. After that a risk resolution plan is created, which is based on the risk factors. All the risk factors and their impact on the project will be analyzed in this plan. These risk factors are monitored throughout the lifetime of the project.
  1. Performance Reporting: In this step, the progress of each of the steps is monitored and the progression is compared with the timelines and schedule documented in the project plan. The techniques such as Earned Value Management can be used to measure and report the project performance.
  1. Project Rollout Planning: The project’s success greatly depends upon the success of the implementations and rollout. The roll out of the project can affect the business systems, technical systems and much more. For the successful implementation of the software, there user must accept it and use it effectively. The users may need training, in order to use the new system effectively.

The planning of the software project does not get completed, until the completion of the project. There is a chance that the project may return to the planning stage many times to complete it or even abandoned it. In short, we can say that the project planning stage is determined by the project complexity.

So it was all about Software Project Planning, Importance, Purpose and Involved Steps. If you have any questions then please comment below.