Summary:
This article starts off by explaining what software scoping is and that doing it well will help establish requirements and expectations between the customer and user, reduce friction during the development process, and help outline budget and timescales. Agile is well suited to support processes because it encourages you to establish high-level requirements first, and finer details later. The article continues by going into certain topics such as how to facilitate engagement, the drawbacks of a highly detailed initial scope, adapting to change, and preventing project creep. Scoping software projects the Agile way means developers can concentrate more of their time creating fantastic code, and business stakeholders have peace of mind that their organization is taking full advantage of the latest digital opportunities.
Reason:
The reason I chose this article is because I know that in software development, we must learn how to create applications in an efficient and straight forward manner. I know that it is difficult to measure the amount of effort it may take to accomplish a task as well as unexpected challenges that might occur. The importance of a well-run team allows for applications to be developed to the best of its abilities.
What I Learned:
I learned that Agile principles help instill a certain level of discipline early on to support the development of software. The agile methodology focuses on a highly detailed initial scop but that doesn’t mean it’s always the best. In doing something so highly detailed, you consume valuable time, create unnecessary delays, there may be a lack of budget clarity, and may be complicated by organizations that don’t know what they need. A lot of the time you don’t know what is going to happen so a team need to be equipped to tackle those issues and agile is built for it. Agile helps absorb negative impact of change by incorporating it at the scoping stage and throughout the rest of the project. Project creep is also something that occurs and that is when the work requirements begin to inflate after a project has begun. With the agile approach, it helps diminish project creep by not being distracted beyond the immediate horizon, like-for-like workload swapping, and contingency tolerance. Not being distracted allows for a developer’s understanding of future stages in a project to remain loosely defined as long as it is practical even with changes to the cope. Like-for-like workload swapping is the last minute desire to abandon requirement X while simultaneously prioritizing the creation of a new requirement Y. A contingency tolerance is when Agile tricks have been exhausted, there is essentially an emergency fund of time that can be dipped into so that the project timelines stay on track.
Source: https://developer.ibm.com/articles/d-scope-software-agile/
From the blog CS@Worcester – Life as a CS Student by Dylan Nguyen and used with permission of the author. All other rights reserved by the author.