For your first assignment you have the opportunity to develop a project planning document and estimate the effort required to produce your proposed system. You may work with a partner if you wish, but I need a written statement from each of you describing who did which portions of the assignment.

The task you are to tackle is develop an e-mail list manager and distribution system for the CIS department faculty and staff. The purpose of this tool is to collect the preferred student e-mail addresses for all UMD student and to distribute them (by course) in electronic form to persons teaching CIS courses. Only new or changed e-mail addresses should need to be entered into the system each semester. Your plan should take into account the effort involved to develop the user interface for the system.

Your final document will need to conform to Pressman's planning document template which may be found at: http://www.rspa.com/docs/Projectplan.html. Your document will need to contain the following sections: introduction ( project scope, major software functions); project estimates (time and cost of producing the system); risk management; project schedule (including deliverables, milestones, work breakdown structure, activity graph); project team organization and staff allocation plan; tracking and control mechanisms (some type of quality assurance plan).

You may assume that you can have several other people from the class, besides you and your lab partner, working on the project. You will need to summarize what capabilities each person adds to the project team and how he or she will be utilized. A very talented person could be listed as part of several proposed project teams for purposes of this assignment.

You are not required to do any programming of this system before you complete your project plan. Your written project plan is due three weeks from today. This is a very difficult assignment, do not put off starting it till the last minute. Please try to keep your resource estimates within the realm of reality for our campus.

Assigned: 9-12-01
Date due: 10-03-01