Defining Project Scope: What’s In, What’s Out

Software teams often complain about scope creep. But how do you even represent scope on a software project?

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Every software team talks about scope, and project team members often complain about unending scope creep. Unfortunately, the software industry lacks a uniform definition of these terms, and the requirements engineering literature lacks clear guidance on how to represent scope. This article presents some definitions and describes several techniques for defining scope on software projects.

What Is Scope?

We can define scope as a set of capabilities that stakeholders agree to be delivered in a specific iteration, build, or product release. Scope defines the boundary between what’s in and what’s out for a body of work. When a project manager agrees that their team will deliver a specific set of functionality at a particular quality level by a particular date, they’ve established the scope of that delivery. When a product owner commits to implementing a particular set of user stories in a development increment or sprint, they’ve defined the scope of that increment.

The scope for any portion of the project represents a subset of the ultimate product vision, a stepping stone on the pathway from project initiation to ultimate product delivery. Every planned chunk of work begins with a baseline of functionality that the team intends to implement during that chunk. That baseline is the reference point for scope change.

Vision and Scope

The vision and scope document is a key software project deliverable. Other terms for such a high-level guiding document are project charter, marketing requirements document, and business case. Vision and scope are two related concepts. I think in terms of the product vision and the project scope. The product vision is:

A long-term strategic concept of the ultimate purpose and form of a new system.

Chapter 5 of my book Software Requirements, 3rd Edition describes how to write a concise and focused vision statement using a keyword template. We can then define the project scope as: