Although the project management discipline outlined in the Rational Unified Process is often not fully appreciated by the development team, project planning is a critical activity for software development. Good planning helps the teamwork together to achieve a set of defined goals in a defined period of time. This white paper, written for project managers and software development managers who are about to embark on the process of planning for a software development project describes a practical approach to project planning based on the RUP project management discipline. It discusses how to create a coarse-grained project plan and an iteration plan for each iteration, while customizing the planning process to fit a particular development environment. It also provides a detailed description of how to employ the planning guide tool that’s available from Rational Software to help plan a software development project.

Many of the concepts presented herein have been introduced in the book Software Project Management: A Unified Framework, as well as in the RUP. See those resources for more details.

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