CSSE 372 – Software Project Management

Final Project Report 12
Lissa Avery, Mark Karasek, Andrew Patterson
February 24, 2006

1.	Description of Project

Team 12 developed the "Center for Structural Engineering Education," a course repository that will satisfy the NSF grant obtained by Jim Hanson, Assistant Professor of Civil Engineering. The repository is designs to provide fellow professors and practitioners with materials appropriate for instructing a course on structural analysis.

2.	Project Organization

Name	Project Role(s)	
Lissa Avery	Team Lead, documentation maintenance	
Mark Karasek	Primary programmer	
Andrew Patterson	Software documentation	

3.	Project Planning and Management

First, a list of tasks to be completed was compiled as early as the first week of the term—this enabled us to have an understanding of what we needed in terms of a project lifecycle plan and project plan before those concepts had been taught in class.

Following the creation of the initial and full project plans, all work was assigned and thought of in terms of items on the project plan.  This made the completion of tasks very modular.

In addition to a strict adherence to the plan, we installed and made heavy use of SVN on an off-site server.  This permitted us to keep a stable copy for the client to view while working and experimenting with new features in branches.

4.	Project Status

We accomplished all but one feature on our feature list, although this will completed during the break before Spring Quarter.  (This is due to a compatibility issue with IAIT's servers.)

5.	Delivered Artifacts

The deliverables include the project website (http://rose-hulman.edu/csee) and Word documentation of the software.

Name of Artifact	Location Relative to Project Web Page Home	
CSEE website	http://rose-hulman.edu/csee	
User documentation		

6.	Comparison of Original Effort Estimate to Actual Effort

Below is the list of differences in estimated effort to actual effort.  Many of the early differences are due to the unexpected loss of a teammate.  We perhaps should have been quicker to compensate for Baker's absence when he became incommunicado over Christmas break. 

The course documentation and meetings took less time than we anticipated due to simple overestimations of time in meetings.

Deliverable	% Difference in Effort	
Course documentation and meetings	-16%	
Stage 1	35%	
Stage 2	17%	
Stage 3	9%	
Stage 4	12%	
Stage 5	-2%	

7.	Problems Encountered

As mentioned previously, we lost a teammate.  One way to have better handled his loss would have been to more quickly move to recover what he took with him and the time lost that he would have worked.

8.	Process Improvement Recommendations

The process seems to work fine.  We have no recommendations.

9.	Recommendations for Future Project Work

For future work, the following features could be implemented:
•	Provide true thumbnails with GD Image or something similar;
•	Category movement (rather than requiring deletion and readdition);
•	Search filters used during searches should be placed in the statistics;