Managing Software Requirements: A Unified Approach

Chapter 19. The Problem of Project Scope

Key Points

• Project scope is a combination of product functionality, project resources, and the time available.

• Brooks's law states that adding labor to a late software project makes it even later.

• If the effort required to implement the system features is equal to the resources over the time available, the project has an achievable scope.

• Over scoped projects are typical in industry.

• In many projects, in order to provide a reasonable probability of success, it will be necessary to reduce the scope by as much as a factor of two.

Components of Project Scope

As with any professional activity, meeting commitments in application development involves making realistic assessments of project resources, time lines, and ...