Plan Summary

Our goal is to create a clone of monster.com which is secure, fast, extensible and will scale
appropriately as the user base grows. We will achieve this goal while minimizing the required
effort by building on the team’s current skill set, utilizing off-the-shelve, open source
components where possible and making use of the Amazon AWS infrastructure and services as
much as possible.

The final product will be based around an open source Content Management System which we
will extend to meet our particular needs. The CMS should provide us with off the shelf tools and
services for user management, content management and publishing for static content like the
Advice section, Career Resources etc.

In order to optimize for parallelization of the development tasks while at the same time having
an integrated product from day one it is advised to use a framework or platform that is based
around the Model-View-Controller (MVC) pattern. This will provide the necessary separation of
concerns to allow for parallelization of development and testability we require.

Scope Metrics
Since we are making an exact copy of an existing site the most objective metric is the feature
parity between the original site and our own.

In the appendix at the end of the document we provide a breakdown of the “Upload Resume”
process in terms of Pages, Page Sections and Actions. These elements are very specific and
thus absolutely quantifiable.

What we call “page” is a design metaphor. It does not necessarily map to one and only one
URL. A page has a specific layout but may have different sections that are dynamic.
A “page section” is part of a page and represents a logical unit of information.
An “action” is a user initiated process the results in a new page section or a new page.
In this context, the “Upload Resume” Process consists of 5 pages and each page consists of a
different number of sections and actions as described in the Appendix.

Technology / Software List

The original site is created in ASP.NET. The decision about which platform to use will mainly
depend on the expertise of the team. Working on our current skills will optimize the outcome in
terms of effort and quality. Most modern platforms (PHP, Ruby on Rails, ASP.NET) do not yield
significant comparative advantage in and on themselves. It is the programmer’s skill and
experience with any of those platforms that will make the difference in terms of the deliverables
and the schedule.
Assuming the team is expert on .NET / C# platform we should go with ASP.NET MVC using
Visual Studio as the dev environment. The MVC pattern allows for a nice separation of
concerns, providing efficient modularity and testability. That means that we can parallelize work
on the front end (HTML/CSS/Javascript) while at the same time work on the backend without
having one breaking the other while having everything integrated progressively from day one.
MVC makes this process much easier compared to classic ASP.NET.

An open source CMS that is based on ASP.NET MVC is Orchard. A Microsoft-backed, open
source CMS with a nice collection of off the shelf modules and large community support.

Since we are using Amazon AWS and assuming the team has some expertise with that, we
should take advantage of Amazon SimpleDB a no-sql database, adequate for our needs,
providing the availability and scalability features we need.

For BLOB file storage (for the uploaded resume files) we will have to use Amazon S3. Amazon
S3 meets our Security, Scalability and Performance requirements while keeping things simple.

Task Breakdown and effort estimation

Please see “Task breakdown and effort estimation” spreadsheet in this folder.

Ideally, when tasks have been identified, the effort estimation for each task should be done by
the actual developers.

The estimation methodology used is that of Steve McConnell, implemented in a spreadsheet.

We provide a Best, Worst and Most likely case estimation for each task and based on
McConnell’s algorithm we get an estimation range with different levels of confidence.

From the “Estimation Ranges” sheet we can see:

· It is a project of 85 to 270 man-hours (Best Case-Worst Case).
· It will take about 155.8 man-hours with 50% probability.
· It will take about 170.5 man-hours with 75% probability.

This is about 22 man-days with 75% confidence.

Calendar duration

Getting a commitment for the confidence point of 75%, utilizing 3 developers and 1 architect we
plan as follows

Design Phase: Database and CMS. 3 days, involving all team.

Development: 10 days (2 weeks)
Testing and bug fixing: 5 days (1 week)
In Total: 3 weeks and 3 days
Appendix

Units Breakdown
· Common Page artifacts
o Section: Header
o Section: Footer
· Page: My Resumes (http://my.monster.com/Resume/ManageResumes)
o Action: Add Resume
o Action: Copy Resume
o Action: Delete Resume
Note: If there are no resumes then the Create Resume page is displayed

· Page: Create Resume (http://my.monster.com/Resume/CreateResume)

o Page Section: Resume Details
o Action: Create a Monster Resume (Redirects to Edit Resume Page)
o Action: Upload an Existing Resume (When file is uploaded it redirects to Resume
Settings

· Page: Edit Resume (http://my.monster.com/Resume)

o Page-wide actions:
§ Action: View Resume
§ Action: Save Changes
o Page Sections:
§ Section: Contact Information
§ Section: Summary
§ Section: Experience
· Section View: Experience List
(http://my.monster.com/Resume/ExperienceList)
o Section Action: Edit Experience
o Section Action: Delete Experience (x mark on each entry)
o Section Action: Add Experience
· Section View: Add/Edit Experience
(http://my.monster.com/Resume/EditExperience)
Note: if there is no experience info, it displays the Add/Edit Section View,
otherwise it displays the List Section View)
§ Section: Education
· Section View: Education List
(http://my.monster.com/Resume/EducationList)
o Section Action: Edit Education
o Section Action: Delete Education (x mark on each entry)
o Section Action: Add Education
 · Section View: Add/Edit Education
(http://my.monster.com/Resume/EditEducation)
§ Section: Certifications
· Section View: Certifications List
(http://my.monster.com/Resume/CertificationList)
o Section Action: Edit Certificate
o Section Action: Delete Certification (x mark on each entry)
o Section Action: Add Certificate
· Section View: Add/Edit Certificate
(http://my.monster.com/Resume/EditCertificate)
§ Section: Skills & Languages
· Section View: List of Skills and List of Languages
o Section Group: Skills
§ Section Action: Edit Skill entry
§ Section Action: Delete Skill entry (x mark on each entry)
§ Section Action: Add Skill entry
o Section Group: Languages
§ Section Action: Edit Language entry
§ Section Action: Delete Language entry (x mark on each
entry)
§ Section Action: Add Language entry
· Section View: Add/Edit Skill (http://my.monster.com/Resume/EditSkill)
· Section View: Add/Edit Language
(http://my.monster.com/Resume/EditLanguage)

· Section: Memberships & Awards

· Section View: List of Memberships and Awards
(http://my.monster.com/Resume/EditAwardsAndMemberships)
o Section Action : Add membership
o Section Action : Add award
Note: This section exhibits different behavior than the other
sections. Memberships and awards are inserted in place. There is
no delete action, the user has to delete the contents of the textbox
and hit save. It is obvious that this was done by a different
developer at a later time.
· Section: Interests
o Section View: List of Interests
(http://my.monster.com/Resume/EditInterests)
§ Section Action : Add Interest
Note: This section exhibits the same behavior as Memberships &
Awards
· Section: References
o Section View: List of References
(http://my.monster.com/Resume/ReferenceList)
 § Section Action: Edit Reference entry
§ Section Action: Delete Reference entry (x mark on each entry)
§ Section Action: Add Reference entry
o Section View: Add/Edit Reference
(http://my.monster.com/Resume/EditReference)
· Section: Resume Settings
o Section View: Edit Settings (http://my.monster.com/Resume/Settings)
§ Section Group: Name
· Section Group Action: Update Name
§ Section Group: Visibility
· Section Group Action: Update Visibility
§ Section Group: Search Settings
§ Section Group: Ideal Position
§ Section Group: Additional Information

· Page: View Resume (http://my.monster.com/Resume/PreviewResume)

o Action: Print Resume
o Action: Download Word 2003 format
o Action: Download Word 2007 format
o Action: Download Text (.rtf) format
o Action: Settings (Edit Resume)
o Section Action: Edit