The Work Breakdown Structure in Software Project Management*

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down to the individual task level, and. later. as a basis for progress reporting relative to meaningful manage- ment milestones. A software management plan ...
The Work Breakdown Management*

Structure

in Software

Project

Robert C. Tausworthe Jet Propllsiotl

Lrrhoultop

The work breakdown structure (WBS) is a vehicle for breaking an engineering project down into subproject, tasks, subtasks, work packages, and so on. It is an important planning tool which links objectives with resources and activities in a logical framework. It becomes an important status monitor during the actual implementation as the completions of subtasks are measured against the project plan. Whereas the WBS has been widely used in many other engineering applications, it has seemingly only rarely been formally applied to software projects, for various reasons. Recent successes with software project WBSs, however, have clearly indicated that the technique can be applied and have shown the benefits of such a tool in management of these projects. This paper advocates and summarizes the use of the WBS in software implementation projects. It also identifies some of the problems people have had generating software WBSs, and the need for standard checklists of items to be included.

INTRODUCTION If one were to be given the task of writing a program, such as that structurally illustrated in Figure 1, in which the target language instruction set was not intended to be executed by some dumb computer, but. instead. by intelligent human beings, then one might be thought to have an easier job than colleagues who write their programs for machines. However, a little reflection will show that this job is much more difficult

The work reported in this paper was carried out at the Jet Propulsion Laboratol-y of the California Institute of Technology under contract NPIS 7-100, sponsored by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration.

The Journal

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