Establishing the Product Vision and Project Scope

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78 Part II Software Requirements Development One sign that the business requirements are insufficiently defined is that certain features are initially included, then deleted, and then added back in later. Vision and scope issues must be resolved before the detailed functional requirements can be fully specified. A statement of the project's scope and limitations helps greatly with discussions of proposed features and target releases. The vision and scope also provide a reference for making decisions about proposed requirement changes and enhancements. Same companies print the vision and scope highlights on a poster board that's brought to every project meeting so that they can quickly judge whether a proposed change is in or out of scope. Defining the Vision Through Business Requirements The product vision aligns all stakeholders in a common direction. The vision describes what the product is about and what it eventually could become. The project scope identifies what portion of the ultimate long-term product vision the current project will address. The statement of scope draws the boundary between what's in and what's out. That is, the scope also defines the project's limitations. The details of a project's scope are represented by the requirements baseline that the team defines for that project. The vision applies to the product as a whole. It will change relatively slowly as a product's strategic positioning or an information system's business objectives evolve over time. The scope pertains to a specific project or iteration that will implement the next increment of the product's functionality, as shown in Figure 5-l. Scope is more dynamic than vision because the project manager adjusts the contents of each release within its schedule, budget, resource, and quality constraints. The planner's goal is to manage the scope of a specific development or enhancement project as a defined subset of the grand strategic vision. The scope statement for each project, or for each iteration or enhancement in an evolving product, can appear in that project's SRS, rather than in a separate vision and scope document. Major new projects should have both a complete vision and scope document and an SRS. See Chapter 10, "Documenting the Requirements," for an SRS template.
Project Scope for release 1.0 Chapter 5 Establishing the Product Vision and Project Scope 79 Project Scope for release 1.1 Product Vision Project Scope . . . for release 2.0 · Project Scope for release n Figure 5-1 The product vision encompasses the scope for each planned release. For example, a federal government agency is undertaking a massive five-year information system development effort. The agency defined the business objectives and vision for this system early in the process, and they won't change substantiaiJy over the next few years. The agency has planned some 15 individual releases of portions of the ultimate system. Each release is created as a separate project with its own scope description. Each scope description must align with the overall product vision and interlock with the scope Statements for the other projects to ensure that nothing is inadvertently omitted. Blue·Sky Requirements A manager at a product development company that suffered near-catastrophic scope creep once told me ruefu11y, "We blue-skied the requirements too much." She meant that any idea anyone had was included in the requirements. This company had a solid product vision but didn't manage the scope by planning a series of releases and deferring some suggested features to later (perhaps infinitely later) releases. The team finally released an overinflated product after four years of development. Smart scope management and an evolutionary development approach would have let the teamship a useful product much earlier.
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Establishing the Product Vision and Project Scope

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