6.3 Types of Objects in Project Perspective

A project is usually divided into a number of life cycle activities. These may be preparation, requirements specification, design, production, integration, test, and operation and maintenance. During the entire lifetime of the product, and therefore during the entire lifetime of each project, support functions that should be performed include project management, quality assurance, and configuration management. In each of the life cycle activities and for each of the support functions, a number of types of objects are produced, and these may be placed under configuration management.

Below are some examples of objects to place under configuration management for life cycle activities and support functions. The objects may or may not be delivered to the customer, but they are in any case not part of the actual product the end user deploys. Again, the lists are by no means exhaustive but may serve as inspiration.

Life Cycle Activities

Project documentation produced in the life cycle activities may, for example, be preparation (contract, statement of work, user requirements), requirements specification (software requirements, other subproduct requirements, prototypes , scenarios), design (architectural design specification, detailed design specification, drawings, diagrams, technical notes), production (no nonproduct objects are produced here), integration (no new objects are produced here), testing (drivers, stubs, test data[base], test specifications and procedures, test reports ), and operation and maintenance (reproduction procedures, installation procedures, implementation procedures).

Support Functions

Objects produced during performance of support functions may be project management (project plans, schedule, minutes of meetings, reports), quality assurance (plans, quality records), and configuration management (plans, release requests, event registrations, change requests , status reports).

Tools

See Tools in the previous section.