Experience with Architecture-Centered Software Project Planning

This position paper describes our experiences with architecture-centered project planning for a software development project. A software architecture design document was the primary input to the top-down and bottom-up planning processes, and a software development plan was the primary output. The software development plan was used by each member of the development team to generate their personal schedules. Keywords: Software architecture, estimation, project planning, high-level design. 1 Introduction In 1995, staff members from Siemens Corporate Research (SCR) were asked to take responsibility for a Siemens software development project. Management responsible for the project wanted us to design a software architecture for the product and determine how much time and resources were required to complete the software development and to bring the product to market. It is well known that effort and schedule estimates given in the very early stages of development can be very inaccurate [1]..