How to Deal with Out of Control Requirements and Save Your Project
by Darren J. Levy
For a project manager or business systems analyst, it's customary to meet with stakeholders to obtain project requirements signoff. However, what invariably happens is the customer deciding they need a new set of features outside the scope of the current requirements document. This dilemma, known as "scope creep" or “feature creep” is a common project killer, and it is critical for a project manager to know how to effectively manage this situation when it occurs.
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| How to deal with Out of Control Requirements and save your project.pdf | 126.66 KB |
Testability Classes and SQL
There are various techniques that may come into play.
Testability classes can be created that simply return valid values to those classes that require what may ultimately become persistent data, subsequently these being replaced by the true functionality.
If you know the database structure and can create the tables (or whatever) then you can simply create scripts to load them until the maintenance type functionality is built.
Perhaps the analogy is flawed, think more of a framework within which areas are being filled, or of a builder building a porch the roof of which is temporarily supported by 2x4's until the pillars arrive.
I think it is important to concentrate on the key functionality so that the stakeholder see it created and get to work with and test it for as long as possible and this is probably where the true requirements problem area's are. Also it's important to concentrate on the key architecture decisions and prove that we can make the system work.
In order to do this we have to stay adaptable and work out ways to support this way of working.