Proceedings of 2009 12th International Conference on Computer and Information Technology (ICCIT 2009)
21-23 December, 2009, Dhaka, Bangladesh
Process Centric Work Breakdown Structure of Software
Coding for Improving Accuracy of Estimation,
Resource Loading and Progress Monitoring
of Code Development
A.K.M Zahidul Quaium, Ahmed Latif Shahriar, M. Rokonuzzaman
School of Engineering & Computer Science, Independent University, Bangladesh (IUB), Dhaka, Bangladesh
zahidulqu@gmail.com, alshahriar@gmail.com, zaman.rokon@yahoo.com
Abstract
This study introduces process centric Work Breakdown
Structure (WBS) for managing challenges for coding
phase of software development cycle. The approach
represents WBS as a process centric view to understand
the inter relationships and dependencies between
activities. Suggested WBS reduces complexities and
gaps of the project plan and its execution by early
simulation of diverse coding activities through process
centric view. It is believed that such process centric
approach instead of tree form representation of WBS
will improve the visibility of coding process during
planning stage for increasing the accuracy of
estimation, resource loading, and progress monitoring.
Keywords: Estimation, Estimation accuracy, software
coding, Manpower loading, SW-CMMI, Work
breakdown structure, Process centric WBS, and Work
product.
I. INTRODUCTION
A. Some statistics of software projects'
successes and failures
It appears that the history of software project
management is dominated by failure statistics. Standish
group's research shows 31.1% projects will be
cancelled before they ever get completed. 52.7% of
projects will cost over 189% oftheir original estimation.
Another survey says 7 out of 10 projects fail in some
respect. On the other hand, 16.2% projects are
completed on-time and on-budget; in large companies it
is 9% [1].
B. Likely reasons for failures and success
It has been reported that reasons of project failure are
poor project planning, poor estimation, lack of risk
assessment etc. Lack of proper distribution of tasks
among the team members may lead the project to
failure. Sometimes project also fails due to week
business case, lack of support and involvement of top
managements, weak definitions of requirements at
project planning stage, use of unproven technology, and
failure of meeting the commitments of the vendors.
978-1-4244-6284-1/09/$26.00 ©2009 IEEE
Lack of user involvement, lack of resources, lack of IT
management or executive support, change in client's
business, and inadequate measurements may cause the
project to be failed as well. On the other hand, effective
project planning helps the project to be succeeded;
reduced cost estimation error, effective measurement
technique, and controlled tracking lead the project to
success.
C. Defining the concept of process centric
software production
The concept describes the whole production cycle as an
integration of processes consisting of different discrete
tasks to be executed in certain sequence. Every process
unit is shown ordered and linked to other processes
units with input or entry and output or exit criteria.
Parallelism of process is another feature of the concept.
The approach emphasizes on logic and preventing
unstructured work. Process centric approach emphasizes
on process performance. Approach helps improve
manageability to deliver higher quality and productivity
through early visualization of production activities
along with their interdependencies. Process centric
software production is not limited to any particular
model as waterfall or agile. It fits to any conventional
model.
D. Defining the current concept of work
breakdown structure (WBS)
Work Breakdown Structure (WBS) [2] is a project
management tool that captures all the work of the
project. It is a tree formatted graphical project
management tool [3] that discrete tasks in organized
way into different work groups at different levels and
also shows effort required to achieve an objective in its
subdivision [4]. WBS also defines the scope of the
project and helps to prepare project schedule. WBS also
provides frameworks for project estimation. It
represents the end objective, dividing in terms of size,
duration, tasks, and subtasks step by step. WBS is also
used to identify and track work packages and
deliverables [5]. In Fig. 1, a basic structure of WBS is
shown.
520

Level 1
Level 2
Level 3
Fig. 1. Basic Structure ofWBS
E. Role of WBS in resource estimation,
scheduling, progress monitoring, detecting
deviations, and taking control actions
Work breakdown structure (WBS) provides a
framework of planning, estimating and controlling the
project. The WBS is organized around the primary
products of the project instead of the work needed to
produce the planned actions. As the planned outcomes
are destinations of the project, they form a relatively
stable set of categories in which the costs of the planned
actions needed to achieve them can be collected. A
well-designed WBS makes it easy to assign each project
activity to only one node of the WBS [3]. In addition to
its function in cost accounting, the WBS also helps map
requirements from one level of system specification to
another, for example a requirements cross reference
matrix mapping functional requirements to high level or
low level design documents. In planning a project, it is
normal to find oneself temporarily overwhelmed and
confused, when one begins to take hold of the details
and scope of even a modest sized project. This results
from one person trying to understand the details of work
that will be performed by a number of people over a
period of time. The way to get beyond being
overwhelmed and confused is to break the project into
pieces, organize the pieces in a logical way using a
WBS, and then get help from the rest of project [6].
F. Similarities and differences between existing
WBS concept and process centric production
process
Both existing WBS and Process centric [7] WBS have
graphical representation of development activities as
project planning tools. Process centric WBS
521
representation emphasizes representation of
dependency, links and parallelism of tasks where
existing tree structured WBS concept emphasizes on
hierarchical representation [8]. Tree form representation
of WBS is not able to represent parallelism and
interrelation among tasks clearly [9].
G. Concept of process centric WBS
representation taking inputs from SW-CMMI
In CMMI Process area 'Integrated Project
Management', it is described to establish objective entry
and exit criteria to authorize the initial and completion
of the task described in the WBS [9]. Process centric
WBS inherits the concept of entry and exit criteria. But
SW-CMMI [10] got limitation guiding WBS in areas of
reducing estimation error, improving manpower loading
and adopting parallelism of activities. It has also no
guidance to simulate the project assumptions with
respect to interfaces between tasks, their
interdependencies and scope of parallel execution in the
early stage of the project [11].
H. Benefits of process centric representation of
WBS in improving project management
capability
Main benefit of process centric [12] representation is
the ability to model and simulate the WBS at the
planning stage taking into consideration of entry and
exit criteria of every task, scope of parallel execution of
multiple tasks and interdependence between tasks.
Such representation of WBS increases the visibility of
execution level project at the planning stage and reduces
the gap between model of production process used in
planning stage [13] and the process which is executed
during the development phase. As a result, there are
reasons to believe that estimation error will go down,
manpower loading error will fall and ability to monitor
progress during the production stage will improve [14],
[15].
II. PROCESS CENTRIC WBS FOR CODING
Process centric WBS for software coding is described
graphically represented in Fig. 2, Fig. 3, and Fig. 4. The
each node ofWBS is considered as process that got one
or more activities. Each node is connected to each other
indicating activity sequences and dependencies. There
are also Input and output criteria against process nodes
in the WBS representation. It should be noted that Fig.
2, Fig. 3, and Fig. 4 are continuation of same WBS.
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522
A. Practices and sub-practices for stepwise complexities at project planning stage. Table I contains
reduction of complexities sample practices, sub-practices and work products for
In a table, against each practice, sub-practices and work software coding.
product are listed. Such table should help to reduce the
Table I Sample of sub-practices and work products against practices for coding
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B. Leaf level sub-practices should follow

certain rules for maximum and minimum grain D. Standard templates for work products
size of each task Templates for work products of each practice should be
Maximum and minimum grain should be determined prepared to ease the work. A sample template for work
following certain rule against leaf level sub-practices. product 'Unit test check lists' is shown at Table III.
Table II contains sample value against leaf level sub-
practices. E. Measurements requirement of each practice

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Table II Leaf level sub-practices with grain size
~ ......
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Measurement is the one of the main challenge
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following attributes:
, Table III Template for Unit test check lists
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c. Sequence of flow of execution of practices

In coding phase follow sequence of practices is required
to be executed as shown in Fig. 5.

523

Time & effort - it is one of the main challenges of a
project manager. If manager can split-out all the tasks of
the projects and measure time & effort each and every
individual single task, he can easily calculate total time
& effort the project.
Quality of code block - every coding block must
comply with organizational or project coding standard.
Resource assumption - To know actual resource
capability and employee turnover is also a challenge of
project management, as a result accurate skill matrix is
very much needed to measures resources.
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Fig. 5. Sequence of flow of execution of practices
F. Stakeholders of practices and proposed
communication management process with
these stakeholders
In coding phase, coders need to frequently contact with
stakeholders for better understanding of the inputs and
outputs. Process centric representation of WBS
establishes the visibility of diverse communication need
among stakeholders at the planning stage. It should be
noted that communication and coordination cost has
been increasing at very high rate due to increase of
project size and geographical distribution of project
team [6]. Typical communications with these
stakeholders are summarized below:
Project manager - every developer needs to frequently
contact with project manager for better understanding of
Complexity of coding - complexity can be a major
factor if product is innovative. In such situation,
innovation functions should be identified and their
complexities should be measured.
Process centric representation of WBS defines different
work products to be produced in the coding process.
Establishment of definitions of work products at the
planning stage enables stakeholders to determine the
measurement need to assess the quality of work
products that will be produced by different activities of
the coding process during the development phase.
t--r--_ _' ~ M"
eaMW~
....
project's requirement. Communication should be formal
and informal.
Team leader - in every project, coding phase is
depended on team leader, actually team environment is
based on team leader so team leader and software
coder's relation is very much important.
Communication should be formal and informal.
Chief technical officer - in general, application coders
don't need to frequently contact CTO; whenever a coder
need to contact then communication must be formal.
Quality assurance manager - Quality assurance
manager also works very closely with application
coders. Sometime QA manager cannot imagine before
developing any unit of the project then QA manager
524
needs to contact with coders and sometime coders need
to talk to QA manager for improving better quality.
Communication should be informal or formal.
Testing manager - sometime application coders need to
talk to testing manager for understanding and clarifying
the actual output of the product.
III. SUMMARY AND CONCLUSION
Process centric WBS of coding helps project manager to
estimate more accurately for coding phase. It helps to
figure out the tasks that can be done in parallel; it
visualizes dependency between tasks improving
scheduling capability. Thus it helps to figure out
manpower loading more accurately and helps to form
the teams more effectively for coding phase. Process
centric view should help the project manager to
simulate the plan for coding phase at very early stage.
Overall, it should help the project plan with reduced gap
between planning and execution. The limitation of the
proposed model is about feedback of the industry yet to
be taken and it has not been applied in any real-life
project yet. In future, the enhancement of the proposed
approach can be made by verifying the model with the
opinion of industry practitioners and implementing it in
several projects.
[10] M. Agrawal, K. Chari, "Software Effort,
Quality, and Cycle Time: A Study of CMM Level 5
Projects," IEEE Transactions in Software Engineering,
vol. 33, no. 3, March 2007, pp. 145-156
[11] Capability Maturity Model Integration
(CMMISM), Version 1.1, Staged Representation,
August 2002.
[12] D. Draheim, L. Pekacki, "Process-Centric
Analytical Processing of Version Control Data",
http://www.pekackL de/publications/
processingVersionControl.pdf
[13] J. Amalraj, C. Hernani, K. Ladouceur, A.
Verma, "Project Management: Challenges & Lessons
Learned." http://www.beg. utexas.edu/ energyeconl
ua_2007/ AB_ Project_ Mgt_ challenges.pdf
[14] J.E. Tomayko, H.K. Hallman, "Software
Project Management." SEI Curriculum Module SEI-
CM-21-1.0 July 1989. ftp://ftp.seLcmu. edu/pub/
documents/mise/ems/ pdf!cm21.pdf
[15] http://www.projectsmart.co.uk/project-
management-time-estimates-and-planning.html

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