At this point in your projects the requirements specification is complete. While projects have been chosen to ensure they seem feasible within a single 10 week quarter, it is still possible that your project is too big to complete in a single quarter.
The purpose of this phase is to perform a time estimate for all project activities still remaining, and to perform an analysis of the major risks confronting your project. The basic idea is to describe any possible problem that result in taking longer than the estimated time.
There are two major kinds of activities still remaining, ones involving production of documents, and the writing and testing of your project's software. To estimate the time necessary to create each document, develop a rough estimate of the number of pages each document will have, and then estimate how long it will take to develop each page. The time estimate for each page can be based on how long it has taken to develop each page of the documents delivered to date (e.g., the scenarios and requirements).
To estimate the time required for coding, go through your requirements document and develop an estimate for how long it will take to implement each requirement, then sum all of these individual times.
Since the time estimates are approximate, they should be expressed as a range with low, expected, and high values.
In this section, you should list all of the potential problems that might cause you to either go over the high estimate for some task, or be unable to complete a particular deliverable on time. These can be factors such as a team member being overcommitted, lack or understanding of key libraries (such as a graphics toolkit), unanticipated difficulty using software development tools (such as a UML tool), and so on.
For each risk, give a brief title for the risk, a description of the risk, the probability of the risk occurring (on the scale: low, medium, high), and a description of the impact of the risk should it occur. Risks should be prioritized, with the most significant risks listed first. The significance of a risk is a combination of the probability of occurrence and its severity. For each risk, provide a short description of the steps your group is taking (or plans on taking) to address the risk.
For more details, see the template and gradesheet.