Effective Software Project Management

Dependency Diagramming

The dependency diagram is built using the lowest level of decomposition in the WBS. In this book, tasks define these lowest level decompositions. For the Standard Waterfall model, the straightforward application of dependency diagramming does the job quite nicely. See Appendix G for a quick refresher if you need it. The Rapid Development Waterfall model presents a rather different set of problems, as discussed in the next section.

Rapid Development Waterfall Model

The first thing you have to do is partition the deliverables into sets of deliverables that can be worked on concurrently. Obviously, dependencies between deliverables sets will have to be taken into account to construct these sets of deliverables. You want to avoid as many cross–deliverable set dependencies as possible. Ideally you would want none. A few dependency diagram configurations are worth discussing. Two simple cases are illustrated in Figures 5-4 and 5-5.

Figure 5-4. Deliverables dependency diagram relationships

Figure 5-5. Maximum cohesion and minimum coupling

Figure 5-4 illustrates a situation where there are design dependencies across two deliverables sets. Detailed Design #2 is dependent upon Detailed Design #1. The net effect of this is to push deliverables set #2 work out to ...