Barry Boehm gave a philosophy that prepares easy and manageable designs or outlines for software projects. He also gave a technique to discuss objectives, management, duties, and technical approach of the project and its necessary resources. Then he named it the W5HH principle when few questions resulted in project properties, definition, and resultant plan to make the project successful. Those questions are :
The W5HH principle in software management exists to help project managers guide objectives, timelines, responsibilities, management styles, and resources. In this lesson, we’ll explore each part.
W5HH questions :
Why the system is going to be developed?
For the purpose of software work, all stakeholders must assess the validity of the system product/project. Here Barry questions that whether the project’s purpose will justify the cost, time spent on it by people?
What is activities are needed to be done in this?
In this Barry questions what task is needed to be done for a project currently.
When is this done?
Project Scheduling is done by the team after recognizing when project tasks will be started and when they enter into the final stage to reach the goal.
Who are the reasons for these activities in this project?
Every member who is part of the software team is responsible for this. And their roles are defined.
Where are these authoritatively located?
Not only do software practitioners have roles in this but also users, customers, stakeholders also have roles and responsibilities organizationally.
How is the job technically and managerially finished?
All technical strategies, management rules of the project are defined after knowing the scope of the project which is being built.
How much part of each resource is required?
This is known by software developers after the estimation of each resource as per the needs of customers/users.
This W5HH principle of Bohem is appropriate irrespective of the scale or difficulty of software projects being developed. These questions help in planning the outline of the project for the software team.
The W5HH principle outlines a series of questions that can help project managers more efficiently manage software projects. Each letter in W5HH stands for a question in the series of questions to help a project manager lead. (Notice there are five ”W” questions and two ”H” questions).
|
W5HH |
The Question |
What It Means |
|
Why? |
Why is the system being developed? |
This focuses a team on the business reasons for developing the software. |
|
What? |
What will be done? |
This is the guiding principle in determining the tasks that need to be completed. |
|
When? |
When will it be completed? |
This includes important milestones and the timeline for the project. |
|
Who? |
Who is responsible for each function? |
This is where you determine which team member takes on which responsibilities. You may also identify external stakeholders with a claim in the project. |
|
Where? |
Where are they organizationally located? |
This step gives you time to determine what other stakeholders have a role in the project and where they are found. |
|
How? |
How will the job be done technically and managerially? |
In this step, a strategy for developing the software and managing the project is concluded upon. |
|
How Much? |
How much of each resource is needed? |
The goal of this step is to figure out the number of resources necessary to complete the project. |
