We Assess Software Projects Differently
Become the one-eyed man in the land of the blind
Most large software projects and digital transformations fail to deliver meaningful results, and in many cases they fail completely. With our approach you can avoid this outcome on your projects, and we want to share our or knowledge so that you too can be more successful.
We know from our own experience of examining nearly 1,000 projects what works and what doesn’t. Now you too can benefit from these techniques when utilizing our accelerated analysis and sizing requirements! Above all else, we hate waste, and we understand how frustrating the negative reputation of software projects can be. After decades of software project management, we have learned key lessons which we have embedded into our products and services. Our approach can help you deliver software faster, better and cheaper.
At ScopeMaster, we do things differently. That difference starts with three key principles:
Software Development Principles
Requirements matter: without clear requirements, success is unlikely.
User focus matters: if it’s not easy to use, success is (yet again) unlikely.
Size matters: functional size is the best way of sizing software.
ScopeMaster is the world’s first commercial software requirements analyser that helps organisations analyse and refine requirements faster, and more thoroughly, so that they can deliver software projects more successfully with less rework.
History
ScopeMaster was formed in 2018, built on decades of team experience running software projects. The ScopeMaster team found several techniques that consistently increased the likelihood of success. Two important factors for success are: functional sizing and high requirements quality.
In 2013, Colin embarked upon a journey of sizing from requirements and optimising requirements analysis. He began with a basic online functional sizing tool, then in 2016 started to investigate automated sizing. The product that we now know as ScopeMaster Analyser has evolved from a requirements sizing to tool to something much more useful and much more powerful. Check out our release notes for more on the product history.
Our focus remains on helping organisations deliver maximum value through software by paying attention to sizing and quality requirements. We are proud to build the world’s first commercial tool which automates requirements analysis and brings huge change to the industry by reducing waste and bringing greater transparency to software work.
If you share our passion, we’d love to talk to you. Join our growing community of bright, productive, like-minded people today!
One Product, Many Benefits
Different customers choose ScopeMaster for different reasons, but across the board, all of our customers want to deliver software faster, more predictably, and more efficiently.
Additionally, we found that two main reasons customers choose ScopeMaster are…
- raising the quality and speed of requirements work
- better sizing and estimation
Responsible, transparent use of AI
We believe that artificial intelligence must be used in a responsible and transparent way. Only through transparency can humans remain the ultimate decision makers.
- Our AI uses Natural Language Processing, which is based on a fixed language model.
- ScopeMaster makes suggestions and recommendations, but never decides for you.
Our claims to fame:
Average Time Saved per user story
The Team
Colin Hammond
Founder, CEO
Colin has over 35 years of IT industry experience. By understanding the principles of software development work first and foremost, it is possible to identify techniques and metrics that actually work. It was this insight that stimulated him to develop the ground-breaking tool ScopeMaster which automates manually intensive work.
Some of Colin’s favourite sayings:
“Everything should be made as simple as possible but no more simple.”
“The maths of testing early stacks up; entering a sprint with poor user stories may be agile but it’s not lean.” (Dr Simon Wright)
“Great things are achieved by small groups of highly competent people.”
Professor Sylvie Trudel
Training
“COSMIC Sizing is at the heart of responsible software management.”
Professor Sylvie Trudel is at the heart of the COSMIC Sizing community and has been teaching the methodology to students and industry for many years.
Dr. Simon Wright
Consulting and Training
“Entering a sprint with unrefined user stories may be agile but it’s certainly not lean.”
Simon has spent over 20 years working on software requirements, user stories, and system specifications. He brings an incredible depth of knowledge to educating and guiding clients on how to make the most of ScopeMaster’s potential.
Huw Thomas
Technical Specialist
Huw is focusing on technical advancements in both language analysis and containerisation.
Wayne Rogers
Business Development
Wayne is our engine for getting the word out, developing our sales pipeline, and ensuring customer success.
Jonathan Elder
Sales and Marketing
Jonathan leads our digital marketing and sales activities.
Vicky Lorriman
Digital Marketing
Vicky runs the digital side of ScopeMaster’s marketing activities.
Advisors
Richard Dannan
Advisor
Richard is an enterprise architect with extensive experience. He brings practical technical and commercial advice to the team.
Lonnie Franks
Advisor & Consultant
Lonnie has over 50 years in IT and has seen it all before. He brings incredible insight and experience to the team.
Rupert Robin
Advisor & Investor
Rupert has over 25 years in business and software. He brings a plethora of skills to the table, including high energy, sales experience, clarity of thought, and keen focus.
ScopeMaster is a cloud-hosted tool for improving the quality, estimation and delivery of software projects. ScopeMaster analyses written requirements and user stories to deliver insight, expose potential defects, offer suggestions for improvement, and provide functional size estimates that can be used to make your software projects more successful.
ScopeMaster’s automated analyser uses AI and numerous other automated analysis steps that have been designed to bring insight, expose problems and estimate size. Using ScopeMaster, you can substantially improve requirements QA productivity across the board.
ScopeMaster has been developed in the UK and is owned by ScopeMaster Ltd. The automated analysis performed by ScopeMaster is unique and subject to International patent application (PCT/GB2019/050478), originally from February 2018. ScopeMaster® is a registered trademark 3291993.
A note from the author:
Thank you for your interest in ScopeMaster.
I set out to create a tool that would help me as a software project manager with the job of measuring software size. I learned about COSMIC function points and wanted to use them instead of IFPUG FP, which I had been using successfully for many years. It turns out that COSMIC was an excellent choice and then, by accident, I created a tool that is very effective in finding defects in requirements.
Nearly a year later, it is so exciting to see analysts and project managers getting such significant and rapid benefits from using ScopeMaster. The software development industry has had such a poor reputation for predictable, on-time, on-budget projects. I am convinced that ScopeMaster has the potential to make a notable contribution to improving the reputation of software project deliveries.
I am very grateful for the advice and wisdom of experts who have helped me validate ScopeMaster, especially Lonnie Franks, Charles Symons, Professor Alain Abran, and Bernard Lonedix. I am also indebted to Capers Jones whose books have inspired me on this journey.
-Colin Hammond, November 2018
“This is really neat….other than general readability, it’s the only static analysis tool for requirements that I have ever seen.”
“I would be shocked if this didn’t improve development team productivity by at least 10 percent.”
“This is of great potential benefit for the requirements community as well as the sizing community. I share your excitement.”
“Another benefit of your tool is that not only does it interpret the requirements, but it actually writes the detail specifications, which can then be used as test cases.”
“It is much harder to remove defects from requirements and design than it is from source code. But if those defects are not removed prior to testing, testing itself cannot find them.”
“Scopemaster doesn’t just help find the requirements defects, but helps educate authors to prevent them in the future!”
“ScopeMaster is an integral part of our project solution set.”
“It’s amazing that you have come up with the right set of functional requirements.”
“Using ScopeMaster, not only I did I find and fix 150 defects in two days, it was actually fun to use!”
“ScopeMaster is a game changer, it’s awesome, and I continue to be blown away by what it does. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again – I wish I’d had ScopeMaster 22 years ago.”
“…I want to use it on any future projects, whether Agile or Waterfall, to tighten up the requirements as early as possible. To me it’s a no brainer.”
“I think it’s amazing, it does so many things. It’s a great tool!”
“At the University of Dayton Research Institute, we pride ourselves on delivering high-quality work, on time and budget, and having total transparency with our clients. ScopeMaster gives us a powerful tool to not only quickly and efficiently price our efforts based on industry standards, but also add a new layer of customer interaction through its reports.”
Analysis Hyperautomated
Listed and reviewed on: Zoominfo, Slashdot, G2, Capterra, How to Architecture, Gartner, SourceForge