Managing Scope Creep: Why, When, and How

All software projects must manage changes to avoid runaway scope creep that threatens success. Here are some effective suggestions.

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Requirements will change and grow over the course of any project. This is a natural aspect of software development. The project manager must anticipate and plan for growth, such as by incorporating contingency buffers into plans when making commitments. Scope creep (also known as feature creep and requirements creep), however, refers to the uncontrolled growth of features that the team attempts to stuff into an already-full project box. It doesn’t all fit.

Ongoing requirements churn and expansion make it difficult to deliver the top-priority functionality on schedule. This demand for ever-increasing functionality leads to delays, quality problems, and misdirected energy. Scope creep is one of the most pervasive problems in software development.

Defining Scope

The first step in controlling scope creep is to document a clearly stated — and agreed to — scope for the project. Without such a scope definition, how can you even tell you’re experiencing scope creep? The techniques described in my article “Defining Project Scope” provide several techniques for defining a project’s…