Project Background

Throughout this course, you will be working on several aspects of a software development project that will result in a complete Software Development Plan document for a project of your choosing. You will not actually be developing any software, but you will work extensively with the concepts of good software development practices. Additional information and the deliverables for each Individual Project assignment will be provided in the assignment description for the project.

Project Selection

The first step will be to select a project as the target for your software development plan. This project will be used as the basis for each of the assignments throughout the course and should conform to the following guidelines:

• Nontrivial: The selected project should be large enough to allow reasonable exercise of the software development planning process.
• Domain knowledge: You should be familiar with the organization or software category to allow focus on the planning tasks without significant time required for domain education.
• Accessibility: You should have good access to the people and other information related to the organization or software because this will be an important part of the planning process.

Select a software development project that fits these requirements, and submit your proposal to your instructor before proceeding further with the assignments in the course. Approval should be sought within the first several days of the course. Your instructor will tell you how to submit this proposal and what notification will be given for project approval.

Assignment Details

For the assignments in this course, you will not be implementing the actual software project—rather, you will be developing a comprehensive Software Development Plan document. Your first task in this process will be to select a project to use as the basis of your design. You will also create the shell document for the final project deliverable that you will be working on during each unit. As you proceed through each project phase, you will add content to each section of the final document to gradually complete the final project delivery.

The project requires that you do the following:

• Submit the project proposal to your instructor for approval.
• Software Development Plan document shell
  • Use Word
  • Title Page
    • Course number and name
    • Project name
    • Student name
    • Date
  • Table of Contents
    • Use autogenerated TOC
    • Should be a separate page
    • Maximum of 3 levels deep
    • Be sure to update the fields of the TOC so it is up-to-date before submitting your project.
  • Section Headings (Create each heading on a new page with “TBD” as the content except for the sections listed under New Content below.)
    • Project Outline
    • Planning
    • Analysis
    • Design
    • Quality Assurance
    • Implementation
    • Maintenance
• New Content
  • Project Outline
    • Briefly describe the project.
    • Include a list of the major goals and constraints for the project.
    • Material can be taken from the approved proposal submitted to your instructor.
    • Be sure this project is approved by the instructor.
  • Planning
    • Identify the stakeholders for the project.
    • Identify the tools required for the project and how they will be used. Tools for systems analysis may include CASE tools, financial analysis tools, project management tools, and Internet resource tools such as groupware and collaboration tools. Be sure to address the following in your tool discussion:
      • Describe the primary features, strengths, and weaknesses.
      • Identify the area(s) of the SDLC and the tasks for which the tools would be useful.
      • Discuss how the use of tools would improve the associated area (or phase) of SDLC. 
    • Identify the software development life cycle model that will be used for the project, including justification of the selection.
    • Identify the major phases of the project, and illustrate how they fit in the selected development model.
• Name the document “yourname_ITSD422_U1Submission.doc.”
• Submit the document for grading.