Update to AGOC on Deliverables, Milestones and Risks

submission to AGOC meeting, 30-Jan-2003

This is an update of section 10.7 of the AstroGrid PhaseAReport (1). In that section, we provided an outline set of milestones based on the components and functionality to be delivered every second iteration. The GSC found that this was not sufficient. The GSC also criticised our failure to provide a risk analysis for the project. This document corrects these failures. When accepted by the AGOC, its contents will be incorporated into the Phase A Report and that report issued formally.

As a quick recall, Phase B of the AstroGrid project is scheduled to begin on January 1st 2003 and continue for a period of two years. All new staff will be recruited onto two-year contracts and, since some may not be on board until March/April time, the project will actually continue into 2005 (thus providing support during the period when the future of AstroGrid is likely to be decided). The project will be carried out using the Unified Software Development Process and development of the software components will be conducted in a series of incremental iterations. This process is documented in some detail in the PhaseAReport.

As is known, all of the AstroGrid project documentation is online (2). In line with this we have added a new root document at PhaseBStructure (3). The project work for Phase B has been broken down into:

• Research Activities
• Component Development

and each of these sections has its own tasks and, within those tasks, deliverables and milestones. This document will present a summary of those more detailed pages (many of which are not yet complete and some of which will only be completed in the second or third iteration).

Component Development: Milestones

It is relatively simple to define milestones for an iterative software development project. A milestone occurs at the end of each iteration. In the case of AstroGrid, we have initially decided upon three-month iterations, so our milestones will occur as in the following table. For each milestone, we have listed the components most changed in that iteration and the functionality to be delivered.

We imagine that Iteration 08 (to complete by 31-Dec-2004) will be mainly concerned with implementing AstroGrid in at least two data centres and fixing any issues that this raises.

Research Activities

Any research activity undertaken during AstroGrid Phase B will be required to deliver specific benefits to the development programme. We have highlighted five such activities:

All research activities conclude with a Design document; this will set out how the results of the research are to be incorporated into the software component development. Deliverables will likely be added to this list after the individual activity research plans are published.

Risks

This topic has also been addressed on the AstroGrid web sites (3). The following is directly transferred from there:

The assessment of probability and impact above are:

• VH: very high
• H: high
• M: medium
• L: low
• VL: very low

The list of risk areas above are:

• Technical: risks which arise from the technologies chosen
  • hardware
  • software
  • network
• Functional: risks which arise from the architecture (4)
• Operational: risks that derive from the delivered system in operation
  • performance
• Social: risks arising from the communities with which the project is concerned or involved
  • VO world
  • astronomy
  • grid
  • e-science
  • funding
  • institutes
• Personnel: risks arising from the personnel involved in the project
  • recruitment
  • loss
  • skills
• Time & Money: risk that we exceed budget or timescales
• Activity Dependencies: risks arising from activity dependencies

The Functional Risks above enjoy a special position in the Unified Software Development Process. These risks are used to determine which use cases are addressed in any iteration. The philosophy is that high functional risk areas are resolved early in the project rather than later when they can adversely impact deadlines. These risks will be identified prior to each iteration and will be reported in the Project Management work package above.

References

-- TonyLinde - 02 Jan 2003