Overscoping: Reasons and Consequences – A Case Study on Decision Making in Software Product Management

Summary, in English

Efficient scope management is a core part of software release management and often a key factor in releasing successful software products to the market. In a case when not all the requirements for the next software product release are known ‘a priori’ and when new requirements are issued throughout the project, the risk of overscoping by including more functionality than can be implemented increases. In this paper, we report on findings from an empirical interview study about understanding the causes and effects of overscoping in a large-scale industrial set up. Six main causes of overscoping have been identified in this work, complemented by root cause analysis of the causes and concluded by effects of overscoping. The results provide an increased understanding of the scoping activity as a continuous activity and outline risks and issues that can lead to a situation of overscoping.

• Author: Elizabeth Bjarnason; Krzysztof Wnuk; Björn Regnell
• Department/s: Department of Computer Science; Software Engineering Research Group; ELLIIT: the Linköping-Lund initiative on IT and mobile communication
• Publishing year: 2010
• Language: English
• Pages: 1-10
• Publication/Series: Fourth International Workshop on Software Product Management (IWSPM), 2010
• Document type: Conference paper
• Publisher: IEEE - Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers Inc.
• Topic: Computer Science
• Keywords: software release planning; case study; requirements scoping; empirical study
• Conference name: Fourth International Workshop on Software Product Management (IWSPM), 2010
• Conference date: 2010-09-25
• Conference place: Sydney, Australia
• Status: Published
• Project: UPITER - Efficient requirements architectures in platform-based requirements management for mobile terminals
• ISBN/ISSN/Other: ISBN: 978-1-4244-8764-6