Working closely with the Canadian Treasury’s cost assurance department, we used ScopeMaster® to provide insight for their cost estimation and planning of a major HR applications consolidation programme.
A backlog of over 2600 requirements were examined in order to determine both the requirements quality and the functional size. The size estimates were provided in both COSMIC function points and simple function points. ScopeMaster performed this sizing analysis (that otherwise would have taken weeks) in just a few hours. Furthermore ScopeMaster provided details of over 3000 probably defects in those requirements. This QA work would have taken weeks if not months to have performed manually.
ScopeMaster provided information about
- Functionality detected and sized
- Missing functionality
- Buried functionality
From this information it was also possible to estimate
- Cost range for delivering the project
- Cost estimate for fixing the requirements problems manually vs with ScopeMaster (10x faster)
- Project cost impact of not fixing the requirements defects vs fixing them
- Likely timelines for the project in either scenario
Technical debt, as defined by Ward Cunningham is the extra work that is incurred as a result of new requirements coming to light during the project. By automating the requirements analysis, fewer surprises are likely, less technical debt and less rework. ScopeMaster was able to avoid technical debt and quantify the savings of doing so.
All in all ScopeMaster provided the costing team with exceptional insight into the project size likely costs, resourcing and timelines. It was also able to expose thousands of requirements defects so that the technical debt and rework on this project could be minimised.
