IT 73 Software Project Management 2 Marks Questions and Answers
TWO MARKS QUESTIONS WITH ANSWERS
UNIT I INTRODUCTION TO SOFTWARE PROJECT MANAGEMENT
1) What is software project management?
Ans: Software project management is the art and science of planning and leading software
projects. It is a sub discipline of project management in which software projects are planned,
monitored and controlled.
2) What is a project?
Ans: A project is defined as:
• A specific plan or design.
• A planned undertaking.
• A large undertaking.
Example: Public works scheme
3) List the characteristics of the products of software projects?
Ans: One way of perceiving software project management is the process of making visible that
which is invisible: Characteristics are Invisibility, Complexity, and Flexibility.
4) What do you mean by the characteristics of invisibility, complexity and complexity of
Software project management?
Ans: Invisibility: The outputs are not seen / visible physically during the software progress.
Complexity: Usually software products contain more complexity than other engineered artifacts.
Flexibility: Software project has the characteristics of changing its code at any time and can
produce the expected result.
5) What are the three activity of software project management?
Ans: Three successive processes are:
• The feasibility study
• Planning
• Project execution.
6) What is feasibility study?
Ans: Feasibility study in short is termed as “learned lessons”. With the help of collected
information, investigation to decide whether a prospective project is worth starting is called
feasibility study.
7) What is planning?
Ans: It is an act of formulating a program for a definite course of action “the planning was more
fun than the trip itself’. Planning in short in defined as “deciding what is to be done”.
8) What is project execution?
Ans: This is the final stage of project, which meant to put the built system to work or operate
under suitable environment.
9) List different stages of project life cycle?
Ans: The Stages in Project Life Cycle are:
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IT 73 Software Project Management 2 Marks Questions and Answers
i) Requirements Analysis, ii) Specification, iii) Design, iv) Coding, v) Verification and
Validation, vi) Implementation/Installation, vii) Maintenance and Support.
10) What is strategic planning?
Ans: Strategic planning is an organization’s process of defining its strategy, or duration, and
making decisions on allocating its resources to pressure this strategy, including its capital and
people. It is the process of identifying an organization’s long term goals and objectives and then
determining the best approach for achieving those goals and objectives.
11) What is Requirements Analysis?
Ans: Requirement analysis is defined as finding out in detail what the users require of the system
that the project is to implement.
12) What is requirement specification?
Ans: Detailed documentation of what the proposed system is to do is called requirements
specification.
13) What is Design?
Ans: Design is the diagrammatic representation of project which we going to do. Design is the
planning that lays the basis for the making of every object or system.
14) What is coding?
Ans: Coding is referred as “heart” of the software development life cycle. Programming lines are
termed as coding, which develops software and the system.
15) What is verification and validation?
Ans: Verification of process is done during the development stage. It is meant for correctness.
Validation of process is done after the development of system.
16) What is the use of change control and configuration management standards?
Ans: Change control and configuration management standards should be in place to ensure that
changes to requirements are implemented in a safe and orderly way.
17) What is system and sub system?
Ans: The term system is defined as “a set of interrelated parts”. A system will normally be part
of a larger system and will itself compare sub systems.
18) What is Management?
Ans: Management is one which performs the following set of activates such as Planning,
Organizing, staffing, directing, monitoring, controlling, innovating and representing.
19) Who are stakeholders?
Ans: Stakeholder is a person who affects/affected by the system.
20) How software projects different from other projects?
Ans: Software projects are similar to other projects, but have some attributes that present
particular difficulties, for example: the relative invisibility of many of their products.
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IT 73 Software Project Management 2 Marks Questions and Answers
UNIT II PROJECT EVALUATION
1) What is project evaluation?
Ans: It is carried out in step 0 of stepwise. Deciding whether or not to go ahead with a project is
really a case of comparing a proposed project with the alternatives and deciding whether to
proceed with it, is termed as project evaluation.
2) What is the 3 criteria project evaluation depends?
Ans: The project evaluation depends on strategic, technical and economic criteria.
3) What is feasibility study?
Ans: Feasibility study is termed as “learned lesson”. Learning from the existing requirements,
documentation, project, moving on to next step of developing the project is termed as feasibility
study.
4) What do you means by programme in software project strategic assessment?
Ans: Individual projects are considered as components. Programme, is a collection of projects
that all contribute to the same overall organization and goals.
5) What is Technical assessment?
Ans: Technical assessment of a proposed system consists of evaluating the required functionality
against the hardware and software available.
6) What are the two primary steps of cost-benefit analysis?
Ans: i) Identifying and estimating all the costs and benefits of carrying out the project.
ii) Expressing these costs and benefits in common units.
7) How economic assessment of a project information system is made?
Ans: The most common way of carrying out an economic assessment of a proposed information
system, or other development, is by comparing the expected costs of development and operation
of the system with the benefits of having it in place.
8) What are Development Costs?
Ans: It include the salaries and other employment costs of the staff involved in the development
project and all associated costs.
9) What are setup costs?
Ans: It includes the costs of putting the system into place. These consist mainly of the costs of
any new hardware and ancillary equipment, but will also include costs of file conversion,
requirement and staff training.
10) What are Direct benefits?
Ans: These accrue directly from the operation of the proposed system. These could, for example,
include the reduction in salary bills through the introduction of a new, computerized system.
11) What are assessable indirect benefits?
Ans: These are generally secondary benefits, such as increased accuracy through the introduction
of a more user-friendly screen design where we might be able to estimate the reduction in errors,
and hence costs, of the proposed system.
12) What are intangible benefits?
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IT 73 Software Project Management 2 Marks Questions and Answers
Ans: There are generally longer terms or benefits that are considered very difficult to quantity.
Enhanced jobs interest can lead to reduced staff turnover and hence lower recruitment costs.
13) What is Net Profit?
Ans: The Net profit of a project is the difference between the total costs and the total income
over the life of the project.
14) What is payback period?
Ans: The payback period is the time taken to break even or payback the initial investment.
15) What are Return on Investment?
Ans: The return on investment (ROl), also known as the accounting rate of return (ARR),
provides a way of comparing the net profitability to the investment required.
ROI = Average Annual Profit x lOO
Total Investment
16) What is Net Present Value?
Ans: The calculation of net present value is a project evaluation technique that takes into account
the profitability of a project and the timing of the cash flows that are produced. It does so by
discounting future cash flows by a percentage known as the discount rate.
17) What is a discounted cash flow (DCE) technique?
Ans: Net present value (NPV) and internal rate of return (IRR) are collectively known as
discounted cash flow (DCF) techniques.
18) What is the benefit of cost-benefit analysis techniques and decision trees?
Ans: Cost-benefit analysis techniques and decision trees provide tools for evaluating expected
outcomes and choosing between alternative strategies.
19) How you can collect internal data and external data?
Ans: Internal data are collected within the organization, usually by transaction processing
systems, but also through employee and customer surveys. External data is collected from a wide
array of sources outside the organization.
20) What is unstructured data and structured data?
Ans: Unstructured data are the data drawn from meeting discussions, private conversations,
textual documents, graphical representations and other “non-uniform” sources. Structure data are
numbers and facts tn’t can be conveniently stored and retrieved in an orderly manner for
operations and decision making.
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IT 73 Software Project Management 2 Marks Questions and Answers
UNIT III ACTIVITY PLANNING
1) What is Risk Management?
Ans: Risk management is the procedure that explains the process of managing risk through
analysis. This procedure does not provide solutions to perceived risks.
2) What is Brainstorming?
Ans: Brainstorming refers to the process of a group of colleagues meeting and working
collaboratively to generate creative solutions and new ideas.
3) What is knowledge management?
Ans: Knowledge management is the combination of activities involved in gathering, organizing,
sharing, analyzing, and disseminating knowledge to improve an organization’s performance.
4) Differentiate product view and project view?
Ans: Product view —> hierarchies relationship among product element.
Project view —> hierarchies relationship among work activities.
5) What is Activity-on-Arrow (AOA)?
Ans: One representation of network diagram put the activity information on the arrows between
the nodes is called an activity-on-arrow representation (AOA).
6) What is Activity-On-Node (AON)?
Ans: One representation of network diagram puts the activity information on nodes and is called
an activity-on-node representation (AON).
7) Write any three network diagram methods?
Ans: PERT — Program evaluation and review technique.
CPM — Critical path method.
ADM — Arrow Diagramming method.
8) What is start-to-start relationship? (BS)
Ans: It means that one activity can start if and only if another activity starts.
9) Difference between earliest start and earliest finish?
Ans: The earliest time period that the activity can start. The earliest finish means that earliest
time period that the activity can finish.
10) What is critical path?
Ans: The path with zero flexibility is called the critical path, because it will have zero float
between all of its activities.
11) List the objectives of activity planning?
Ans: i) Feasibility assessment
ii) Resource allocation
iii) Detailed costing
iv) Motivation
v) Co-ordination.
12) What is Project Schedule?
Ans: Once the plan has been refined to detail level, then it is called s project schedule.
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IT 73 Software Project Management 2 Marks Questions and Answers
13) What do you mean by an ideal activity plan?
Ans: A plan of when each activity would ideally be undertaken where resources not a constraint
is termed as an ideal activity plan.
14) What do you mean by precedence requirements?
Ans: Some activities might require that others are completed before they can begin. These are
known as precedence requirements.
15) What do you mean by activity-based approach?
Ans: The activity based approach consists of creating a list of all the activities that the project is
thought to evolve.
16) What is Work Breakdown structure?
Ans: This identifies main tasks required to complete a project and then breaking each of these
down into a set of lower-level tasks.
17) What is product flow diagram? (PFD)
Ans: The PFD indicates, for each product, which other products are required as inputs. The PFD
can therefore be easily transformed in to an ordered list of activities by identifying that turn some
products in to others.
18) State forward pass rule?
Ans: The earliest date for an event is the earliest finish date for all the activities terminating at
that event - where more than one activity terminates at a common event we take the latest of the
earliest finish dates for those activities.
19) State backward pass rule?
Ans: The latest date for an event is the latest start date for all activities that may commence from
that event. Where more than one activity commences at a common event we take the earliest of
the latest start dates for those activities.
20) What do you mean by activity float and its types?
Ans: Whenever an event have slack, then activity posses float. Two types of activity float are
i) Free float, ii) Interfering float.
UNIT IV MONITORING AND CONTROL
1) What is the purpose of project monitoring and control?
Ans: The purpose of project monitoring and control is to ‘keep the team and management up to
date on the project’s progress.
2) What are the different categories of reporting?
Ans: i) Oral — formal — regular.
ii) Oral — formal — adhoc.
iii) Written — formal — regular.
iv) Written — formal — adhoc.
v) Oral — informal — adhoc.
3) What is BCWS?
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IT 73 Software Project Management 2 Marks Questions and Answers
Ans: The budgeted cost of tasks as scheduled in the project plan, based on the costs of resources
assigned to these tasks, plus any fixed costs associated with the tasks, called
“The Budgeted cost of work Schedule” BCWS. It is the baseline cost up to the status date you
choose.
4) What is ACWP and BCWP?
Ans: The actual cost required to complete all or some portion of the tasks, up to the status date.
This is to the actual cost of work performed (ACWP). The value of the work earned by the work
performed and is called the budgeted cost of work performed (BCWP).
5) What is cost variance (CV) and schedule variance (SV)?
Ans: cost variance is the difference between a task’s estimated cost and its actual cost.
CV= BCWP -ACWP.
Schedule variance (SV) is the difference between the current progress and the schedule progress
of a task in terms of cost.
SV = BCWP - BCWS.
6) What is cost performance index (CPI) and schedule performance index (SPI)?
Ans: Cost performance index is the ratio of budgeted costs to actual costs.
CPI= BCWP
ACWP Schedule performance index is the ratio of work performed to work schedule
SPI= BCWP/BCWS
7) Who is the client and supplies in contract management?
Ans: Client is the customer who asks for a contract to work for his project. Client may be
customer or sometimes company, which is the client to supplier (controller). Supplier, is one
who supplies goods and services may be contractor/company owner.
8) What is form of agreement in contract management?
Ans: Form of agreement in contract management written, and subjected to legal consideration.
9) What are goods and sources to be supplied in contract?
Ans: Goods are equipment and software. Sources to be provided are: training, documentation,
installation, conversion at existing files, maintenance agreements , transitional insurance
arrangements.
10) What is the environment of contract?
Ans: Environment: For physical equipment: accommodation, electrical supply etc.
For Software: OS platforms, hardware etc.
11) What are customer commitments?
Ans: Customer commitment is when work is carried out by external contractors, a development
project still needs the participation of the customer.
12) What is standard in contract?
Ans: Standard: ISO 12207 standard relating to the software life cycle and its documents. ISO
12207 standard provides for the customer to have access to quality documentation. ISO 9000
series for progress meetings and progress information.
13) What is COTS?
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IT 73 Software Project Management 2 Marks Questions and Answers
Ans: Customized off-the-shelf (COTS) software is a basic core system, which is modified to
meet the needs of a particular customer.
14) What are the different types of contracts?
Ans: a) Fixed price contracts.
b) Time and materials contracts.
c) Fixed price per delivered unit contracts.
15) List two methods for visualizing progress?
Ans: i) Gantt Charts (Static).
ii) Time-line Charts (Dynamic).
16) What is cost monitoring?
Ans: Cost Monitoring is monitoring expenditure for the project. Project costs may be monitored
by a company’s accounting system.
17) What is planned expenditure?
Ans: Planned expenditure is one in which the costs incurred by the project is estimated before
project starts.
18) What is Earned Value. List some of the common methods for assigning earned value in
software projects?
Ans: Earned values analysis, also known as Budgeted cost of work performed. The common
methods for assigning earned value in software projects are
i) The 0/100 technique.
ii) The 50/50 technique.
iii) The milestone technique.
19) What is Contract management and Contract?
Ans: It is the management of contracts made with customers, vendors, partners or employees. A
contract is a written or oral legally-binding between the parties identified in the agreement to
fulfill the terms and conditions outlined in the agreement.
20) Where to use time and materials contract?
Ans: A time and materials contract may be used only when it is not possible at the time of
placing the contract to estimate accurately the extent or duration of the work or to anticipate
costs with any reasonable degree of confidence.
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IT 73 Software Project Management 2 Marks Questions and Answers
UNIT V MANAGING PEOPLE AND ORGANIZING TEAMS
1). What is milestone?
Ans: A milestone is a significant event in a project, usually associated with a major work product
or deliverable. Stages or phases are not milestones but are collections of related product
activities.
2) Differentiate leaders and managers.
Ans: Leaders- Set direction, do the righthing
Managers- Follow process, do things right.
3). Give some unites for measuring the size of the software.
Ans: Lines of code (LOC), Function points, feature points, number of bubbles on the data flow
diagram, number of entities on entity relationship diagram.
4). Write the any two advantages of LOC.
Ans: 1. It is widely used and universally accepted.
2. LOC is easily measured upon project completion.
5). What are dependencies?
Ans: Dependencies are one form of constraints for any project. Dependencies are any
relationship connections between activities in a project that may impact their scheduling.
6). Define project portfolio?
Ans: Project portfolio is group of project carried out under this sponsorship and/or management.
7). Write the goal of software project planning?
Ans: Software estimates or documented for use in planning and tracking the software project.
8).What is Legacy code?
Ans: Code developed for a previous application that is believed to be of use for a new
application.
9).What is brainstorming?
Ans: Brainstorming refers to the process of a group of colleagues meeting and working
collaboratively to generate creative solutions and new ideas.
10).What is knowledge management?
Ans: Knowledge management is the combination of activities involved in gathering, organizing,
sharing, analyzing, and disseminating knowledge to improve an organization’s performance.
11). How you can collect internal data and external data?
Ans: Internal data are collected within the organization, usually by transaction processing
systems, but also through employee and customer surveys. External data is collected from a wide
array of sources outside the organization.
12).What is unstructured data?
Ans: Unstructured data are the data drawn from meeting discussions, private conversations,
textual documents, graphical representations and other “non-uniform” sources.
13).What is structured data?
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IT 73 Software Project Management 2 Marks Questions and Answers
Ans: Structured data are numbers and facts that can be conveniently stored and retrieved in an
orderly manner for operations and decision-making.
14).What is the phases in systems development life cycle (SDLC)?
Ans: 1. Planning 2. Analysis 3. Design 4. Implementation 5. Support.
15). Write some ways to collect information for system requirements.
Ans: 1. Interviews
2. Questionnaires
3. Examination of documents
4. On-the-job observation.
16). Write the goals of project management.
Ans: 1. Complete the project on time
2. Complete the project within budget
3. Meet requirements
4. Meet expectations.
17). Write the types of roles.
Ans: Database designers, Configuration Management experts, Human interface Designers, Web
Masters, Network Specialists, System architects, Programming language experts.
18). Define Load Leveling.
Ans: Load Leveling is the process of rescheduling tasks that have available slack to achieve
more balances distribution of resource usage.
19). Name the three forms of presenting a project schedule.
Ans: Table, Gantt chart, Network diagram.
20).What are the managerial activities?
Ans: Project planning, tracking, control, risk analysis.
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