Blog
Digital Transformation Risks
Digital transformations, or large software projects have a reputation for exceeding their original budgets and schedules. It turns out that they are almost never early and nearly always late. A new study on project failures looks at a new set of projects data from a statistical perspective. It is essential to work proactively to reduce the factors that will cause a project to go over budget and overschedule. One of the biggest risks on large digital transformations is with requirements. Requirements clarity, consistency and volatility are all risks that require pro-active management and here's and graphic to illustrate why: A team working [...]
Jira App Story Analyser – Effortless backlog estimation and QA
26th April 2023, ScopeMaster Ltd, UK announces a significant update to the Story Analyser App for Jira The Story Analyser App provides advanced analysis and insight of individual user stories and entire backlogs without having to leave Jira. The Story Analyser is built on the same, highly-rated, software requirements analysis engine that is used by the ScopeMaster Saas for large software projects. From inside Jira, software teams can benefit from the analysis automation that will save time on estimation, improve user story quality and give greater insight into both individual and sets of user stories. ScopeMaster will provide a functional interpretation of each individual [...]
Large Software Projects – Success
Large software projects are highly prone to delay and even failure. For success, careful planning, effective communication, and a high level of technical expertise and focus on quality are needed to overcome many of these challenges. The Standish Chaos Report and the CISQ group's Cost of Poor Quality Report 2022 both confirm that large software projects have a very high probability of failure. And that failure rates have not reduced, in spite of Agile. Scale Knowledge work does not scale. In fact there are diseconomies on software work, in other words, the bigger they [...]
Agile Principles of Business Analysis and ScopeMaster
ScopeMaster can help increase adoption of many of the seven business analysis principles for agile software work, The Seven Business Analysis Principles for Agile The IIBA's Agile Extension to the BABOK® Guide presents seven Business Analysis principles for Agile work: See the whole. Think as a customer. Analyze to determine what is valuable. Get real using examples. Understand what is doable. Stimulate collaboration and continuous improvement. Avoid waste. In this article we show how closely ScopeMaster directly facilitates these seven principles of Agile thinking of the business analyst. 1. See the Whole ScopeMaster [...]
Rework on Software Projects
Software Rework Explained Software rework, is the consequential work that arises from altering requirements, designs, code and tests after some work has already been started. On most software undertakings this represents 30-50% of all activity. We generally exclude bug fixing from the category of software rework. Rework generally describes the extra work that is a consequence of “requirements change”. Software Rework - Good or Bad Some rework may be viewed as a positive indicator that feedback from users is guiding change towards what is needed. This is fair if the changes were unforeseeable. However typical rework levels on software [...]
Technical Debt – Estimation and Costs
The Meaning and Origin of "Technical Debt" The metaphor of Technical Debt (TD) in the context of software was coined by Ward Cunningham who at the time was working on coding a financial system. He used the metaphor to explain to his financial colleagues the reasoning for refactoring and rewriting parts of codes as the knowledge of the requirements evolved. "When taking short cuts and delivering code that is not quite right for the programming task of the moment, a development team incurs TD. This debt decreases productivity. This loss of productivity is the interest of the TD." Ward's original intended explanation was fairly [...]