Best practices for avoiding scope creep

It’s not uncommon for a software development project to require unexpected changes to its scope well into the development process. This is often referred to as “scope creep” – adding certain new features which were not initially agreed upon and thus not included in the original scope.

The reasons for scope creep vary, but its negative impacts tend to be very similar: it hinders agile development and leads to longer sprints, missed deadlines & KPIs, and frustration both for the people involved as well as the visitors of the site/users of the resulting digital product.

Let’s take a look at a few best practices for avoiding scope creep and ensuring a smooth development process.

Good communication & documentation

As we’ve highlighted in a previous article, communication is one of the most important things in software development, and documentation is one of the surest forms of communication for developers.

Communication should be consistent throughout all phases of the development process. It should be timely, honest and transparent – especially regarding estimates and core challenges, as they would affect the scope the most if not addressed properly early on.

Thorough discovery & strategy phase

If you skip the strategy phase and jump straight into the execution, the risks of scope creep become much higher. Make sure you start projects with a thorough discovery and planning phase, where you do the key market & user research, determine the most suitable technologies to address the findings of your research, and build the team(s) that will take care of the development.

It goes without saying that you should include developers and engineers in this phase already. If you work with an external development partner, it’s wise to include them in the discovery phase as well, especially if external developers make up a large portion (or the entirety) of your development team.

Agile planning

It’s something of a myth that agile software development doesn’t involve any planning. In reality, agile planning is one of the surest methods for keeping the development on track, aligned with key objectives and within scope.

Agile planning is more frequent and iterative than typical planning, allowing the project to more easily adapt to both internal and external changes. It still includes long-term planning, but facilitates quick and smooth replanning in response to these changes, which helps minimize the impacts of potential changes to the project’s scope and consequently the risks of scope creep.

Considering the pains & needs of all stakeholders

One of the key parts of the strategy phase should be accounting for the pains, needs and goals of all the different stakeholders of the project. That includes the goals of the brand/company and specific product owners, as well as the habits, challenges and needs of the customers and/or users you are developing for.

If you only attempt to address the needs of one stakeholder group and ignore other stakeholders, you’re basically just postponing this vital part of the development process to just before the launch, or – even worse – after the launch has already happened, and you then need to scramble to retroactively fix any issues or failures.

Considering main priorities, challenges & risks up front

Just as importantly as with stakeholder needs and goals, it’s also essential to consider the main challenges and possible risks up front, as well as certain key elements of the development process that can sometimes go missed if not properly accounted for. Namely, you should:

• Identify the most important potential risks, and then find proactive ways of addressing and mitigating them. These risks will vary from project to project, but you’ll likely always have to more carefully consider a few key areas such as security and privacy.
• Identify the key challenges your new website/application aims to resolve, as well as the most likely challenges you expect the team(s) to encounter during the development process.
• Make testing an integral & concurrent part of the development process rather than an afterthought; embrace test-driven development and make use of both automated and manual testing for better quality assurance.
• Likewise, make sure to prioritize accessibility from the start rather than attempting to add accessibility features at the end once you’ve already made other user experience prioritizations.

Conclusion

Scope creep presents a lot of challenges to successful and timely development, especially for complex, business critical cases. As such, it’s very much advisable to take proactive steps to avoid and/or at least minimize scope creep and the impact it has on a project. We hope this article has armed you with the right recommendations & tips to help all your future projects run as smoothly as possible!