How to effectively scope your software projects
Since starting my career as a software engineer, I’ve learned that scoping is one of the hardest things to get right. Unfortunately, CS programs in universities don’t really teach you how to scope projects. So here’s my attempt at consolidating what I’ve learned on this topic.
Scoping isn’t something that you can spend a day on during the project and never think about again. In fact, to scope a project accurately, you need to pay attention throughout the project during:
One of the most important things to do during this time is to define very specific goals for the project. For example, instead of “improve X to be more scalable and performant,” a better and more specific goal might be to “improve X by adding unit tests, supporting 20K queries per second, and reducing capped mean of user latency to <= 200ms.”
Having very specific goals allows you to ruthlessly cut anything that does not contribute to these goals, so that you don’t suffer from feature creep. Along these lines, you might also consider explicitly defining anti-goals, and separating must-haves and nice-to-haves.
