Assignment: Software System Engineering Process
Project Background
Throughout this course, you will be working on several aspects of software development process improvement that will result in a complete Software Development Process Improvement Plan for a hypothetical organization of your choosing. You will not be developing any software, but you will work extensively with the concepts of good software development processes.
Project Selection
The first step will be to select a hypothetical organization and software category for your Software Development Process Improvement Plan. Examples would be a company that develops its own software for internal use, a company that develops software for external sale, or a company that provides contractual software development. This organization will be used as the basis for each of the assignments throughout the course and should conform to the following guidelines:
• Nontrivial: The selected organization should be large enough to allow reasonable exercise of the software development processes you will identify.
• Domain knowledge: You should be familiar with the organization or software category to allow focus on the software development processes 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 category because this will be an important part of the process improvement.
Select an organization and software category that fits these requirements, and then 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.
The proposal should be a document of approximately half a page, with enough detail to explain the hypothetical organization and software category that you have chosen.
Assignment Description
For the assignments in this course, you will not be implementing the actual project, but rather, you will be developing a comprehensive Software Development Process Improvement Plan document. Your first task in this process will be to select a company and software category 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.
Part 1
The project deliverables for Part 1 are as follows:
• Proposal for company and software category to instructor for approval (1/2 page)
• Software Development Process Improvement Plan shell (document detailed below)
o Title page: Should include course name and number, project name, student name, and date
o Table of contents: Auto-generated, in a separate page and should be updated in each phase
o Section headings (create each heading on a new page with TBD as content except for sections listed under "New content" below)
- Project Outline (Part 1)
- Process Improvement Background (Part 1)
• New content (needs to be filled in for phase 1)
o Project outline (1 page)
- Identify the company and category of software developed.
- List process improvement goals.
- Material can be taken from the approved proposal submitted to instructor.
- Be sure this project is approved by the instructor.
o Process improvement background (2-4 pages)
- Research current industry-accepted software development process improvement methods.
- Choose the methods that you will use to guide your process improvement plan and justify your selection
- Describe background material from your choice of industry-accepted software development process improvement methods.
Part 2
One of the major applications of process improvement is in the overall software development process. This section of the process improvement plan will focus on the areas that need improvements within the process, and the best practices that can be used to improve those areas. Starting with the goals established for the process improvement plan, examine your hypothetical company's current development processes, identify its areas of improvement, and identify the best practices that can be applied as part of the improvement plan.
During this phase, you need to do the following:
• Update the Software Development Process Improvement Plan document title page with a new date.
• Update the previously completed sections based on the instructor's feedback.
• New Content:
o Work within the subsection titled Best Software Practices for Process Improvement.
- Identify the problem.
- Identify the areas that need improvements within the organization, the process, or the team.
- Identify the solution.
- Identify at least 3 best software practices that fit the organization that you selected to improve.
- Provide brief descriptions of each of those practices.
- Justify the solution.
- Make sure that you justify your selection for each practice and how it will improve the process.
- Implement and communicate the solution.
- Provide a plan to implement and communicate those improvements, and analyze the potential benefits that these improvements will have on the organization and its processes.
Format your assignment according to the following formatting requirements:
1. The answer should be typed, double spaced, using Times New Roman font (size 12), with one-inch margins on all sides.
2. The response also includes a cover page containing the title of the assignment, the student's name, the course title, and the date. The cover page is not included in the required page length.
3. Also include a reference page. The Citations and references should follow APA format. The reference page is not included in the required page length.