Software Quality

Chapter 8Preproject Process – Contract Review

8.1 The CFV Project Completion Celebration – an Introductory Mini Case

A happy gathering of the Carnegie Fruit and Vegetables (CFV) project team at a popular downtown restaurant took place to celebrate the successful completion of a 10-month project for CTV, a produce wholesaler. The new information system registers product receipts from growers, processes customer orders, produces shipment documents for customers (greengrocers and supermarkets), bills customers, and calculates payments to be made to the growers.

The team was especially proud that the project was on schedule, and especially jubilant as earlier that morning, each member had received a nice bonus for completing the project on time.

The third speaker, the software company's Vice President of Finance, altered the pleasant atmosphere by mentioning that this very successful project had actually lost about $90,000. During his remarks, he praised the planners for their accurate estimates of resources needed for the analysis and design phase, and for the plans for the broad reuse of software from other systems that were, this time, completely realized. “The only phase where our estimates failed was one of the project's final phases, customer training, when the customer's staff is instructed on how to use the new information system. It now appears that no one had read the relevant RFP (requirement for proposal) section carefully enough. This section stated in a rather innocuous ...