The Complete Software Project Manager

Chapter 11First Deliverables: Testing, QA, and Project Health Continued

Let's take a moment to review where we've been.

The Project's First Third

The first third of the project was occupied with preparation, which involves:

• Roles, team building, and conflict resolution
• Discovery
• Risk identification
• Business requirements

When reaching the end of the first third, we had enough understanding to budget the project and a reasonable amount of confidence that there was a shared understanding about and agreement on what we were going to program.

The Second Third

Then came quiet, discussed in the previous chapter. This is the second third of your project. Underneath the quiet there is a lot of re-re-re-understanding going on and negotiation on scope changes. Now we're just about to see things come off the production line. So our timeline looks like Figure 11.1.

Figure 11.1

A First Real Look at the Software

As we enter the final third of the project, enough coding has been done that businesspeople see the first true “major deliverable.” What do I mean by major deliverable? Even if you have done a lot of mini-deliverables and demos along the way, at some point, all the pieces must be put together. Traditionally this is called the “alpha stage” of software development: the first true look-see at all of it, or most of it. If you have not chosen to or been able to provide a lot ...