BOWIE STATE UNIVERSITY
DEPARTMENT OF MANAGEMENT INFORMATION SYSTEMS
INSS 615.191 – PRINCIPLES & PRACTICES OF INFORMATION SYSTEMS
DEVELOPMENT
FALL SEMESTER, 2019
EXERCISE #06
NAME: ________________________________ DATE: _________________
Instructions: Answer each question thoroughly. Points will be deducted for fragmentary answers. The
weight associated with each question is a weight of 10 points. The completed assignment should be
submitted in the designated Drop Box by midnight on Sunday, December 08, 2019.
1. In addition to the risks shown in Figure 22.1 (see Chapter 22 of the
Sommerville textbook), identify at least five other possible risks that could
arise in software projects.
2. Alice is an experienced project manager working in a company developing
assistive technology products. Her project is going well but in the course of
the project, the personal circumstances of two team members changed.
I. Carol’s oldest child starts at school, which finishes at a different time
from the kindergarten of her youngest child. This makes her current
working arrangements very difficult so she asks if she can work from
home most days, spending only 1 day a week in the office.
II. Ed, the user interface designer, decides to relocate to a different part of
the country with his partner who has a new job there. He offers to resign
but Alice is keen to maintain the team so she offers him the opportunity
to work remotely. Alice understands the importance of maintaining
team communications and conventional techniques such as daily face
to face meetings are not impossible. She therefore decides to use a range
of technologies to facilitate communications in the team:
a) The team have a weekly skype conference early on Friday morning.
This is simply to catch up on news and work done. Team members who
are travelling on business as well as those working remotely are
expected to attend. More frequent skype and phone discussions
between team members are encouraged.
b) She sets up a project blog and every team member, every day is
expected to write a short report (5/6 lines) about what they have done
that day.
c) A project Twitter account is set up for team members to pass snippets
of information to each other.
d) Every 2 months, all team members have to attend a ½ day face to face
meeting where issues are discussed.
3. Explain why the process of project planning is iterative and why a plan must
be continually reviewed during a software project.
4. Cost estimates are inherently risky, irrespective of the estimation technique
used. Suggest four ways in which the risk in a cost estimate can be reduced.
5. A software manager is in charge of the development of a safety-critical
software system, which is designed to control a radiotherapy machine to treat
patients suffering from cancer. This system is embedded in the machine and
must run on a special-purpose processor with a fixed amount of memory (256
Mbytes). The machine communicates with a patient database system to obtain
the details of the patient and, after treatment, automatically records the
radiation dose delivered and other treatment details in the database.
The COCOMO method is used to estimate the effort required to develop this
system and an estimate of 26 person-months is computed. All cost driver
multipliers were set to 1 when making this estimate.
Explain why this estimate should be adjusted to take project, personnel,
product and organizational factors into account. Suggest four factors that
might have significant effects on the initial COCOMO estimate and propose
possible values for these factors. Justify why you have included each factor.