Frequently Asked Questions about ScopeMaster® – FAQ
Here are the answers to some commonly asked questions:
Yes, ScopeMaster performs natural language processing (and many other techniques) to understand the functional intent of user stories
Once it understands the intent, it is then able to:
- Find and alert you to a variety of potential problems with your user stories
- Suggest potential improvements
- Estimate the functional size
- Propose functional test scripts
- Estimate other project characteristics
ScopeMaster is the first (and only, as far as we know) software requirements analyser that analyses the text of user stories in order to interpret the written functional intent of the author. By understanding the functional intent, it is then able to perform valuable analysis that bridges the gaps between requirements and development.
No, ScopeMaster is smart enough to understand when specialised terms are being used without any pre-training.
ScopeMaster uses Natural language processing (a branch of Artificial Intelligence) as a step in the analysis work.
ScopeMaster is a requirements analyser, whereas Jira, Azure DevOps and other requirements tools are essentially for recording and collaborating around requirements. They are requirements repositories and issue collaboration tools. ScopeMaster does not replace those tools, it complements them.
We recommend that you refine and size your stories first in ScopeMaster then transfer to your favourite collaboration tool via CSV (it takes only a few minutes). The valuable work that ScopeMaster does for you more than justifies the few minutes to export from one tool and import into another.
The fastest way is to import a CSV / spreadsheet file. A flexible field mapping feature means that you can transfer from almost any other repository into ScopeMaster in just a few minutes. You can also enter your user stories directly into ScopeMaster, and of course you can export everything too.
ScopeMaster can analyse user stories (or software requirements) written in:
- English
- Spanish
- Italian
- Portuguese
- German (experimental)
- Dutch (experimental)
As we are only looking at the requirements, you can develop your software using any language, framework or package that you want.
In short, no. ScopeMaster does not constrain writing style. You do not have to follow any predefined pattern of sentence structure, however requirements or user stories must have a clear functional meaning in order to be unambiguous. For example each of the following would be accepted as functionally interpretable:
- as an administrator I can edit a user profile
- I can edit a profile.
- I am an administrator and I want to modify a user profile.
- Administrators can edit user profiles
- managers edit profiles
- managers edit all profiles
- a profile [record is] edited
The English language is extremely flexible. In order to accommodate unusual phraseology you can use square brackets. Any text within square brackets is ignored by the language analyser.
Even though these examples are considered interpretable by ScopeMaster, it does not necessarily mean that they are high quality.
Compared with the manual alternative, ScopeMaster is ridiculously fast! It performs important analysis work in seconds, that would take hours if done manually. It does important but sometimes tedious checking work, and it does it without supervision. ScopeMaster can analyse a set of user stories in a matter of a few minutes, work that might otherwise take days to do. At an average of 3 seconds per user story, depending on length and complexity, ScopeMaster is incredibly fast and thorough.
Finding defects in requirements normally takes 3 or four people discussing stories in a room. To find a defect in a user story without ScopeMaster might take (on average) 2-4 hours of effort, whereas with ScopeMaster it will only take a few minutes.
All software collaboration repository tools can import CSV formatted lists of user stories. You can export from ScopeMaster in CSV format and then import to your favourite collaboration repository in a matter of minutes. So we recommend that you refine your stories in ScopeMaster first, then import them into your usual tool thereafter. This entire process may only happen once per project, that’s a few minutes, compared with the days and weeks saved by using ScopeMaster to perform the analysis on your user stories.
We only charge for the analysis work that ScopeMaster performs, and this is charged on a per user story analysed basis. Analysis credits can be purchased in batches depending on how many user stories you need to analyse. Each story analysed consumes one credit. You can re-analyse a story as many times as you like in a 30 day period for no extra cost.
The typical cost per user story is $10.
The typical cost-benefit ratio is in excess of 1:20! Yes that’s right, it’s not a typo, you really can expect a 20x return on investment in a matter of weeks!
See our pricing page for the bundle options and more details.
ScopeMaster is currently only available as a cloud hosted tool. There is nothing to download, you just need a browser and some user stories. An on-premise version is on our development road map for 2022.
ScopeMaster was designed as a tool for estimating functional size. ScopeMaster can estimate functional size in the main ISO standards: COSMIC Function Points and IFPUG Function Points also the IFPUG derivative: Simple Function Points. The ScopeMaster analysis engine interprets the functional intent of each user story, detects the typical data movements which is the functional size of each story from which it then estimates the functional size.
Knowing the size is very valuable on software projects because, functional size is one of the most significant factors in determining cost and schedule. It is also the most reliable and consistent way of measuring software endeavours.
Independent comparative tests have shown that ScopeMaster can estimate the functional size in COSMIC function points to within 15% of a manually derived size measurement. This level of accuracy represents a leap forward for the industry. ScopeMaster can do the sizing work in seconds o that would normally take hours or days to do manually. Precision of estimates by ScopeMaster in IFPUG or SiFP is lower, not because of ScopeMaster, but because of the general approach to sizing by the different methodologies.
Overview
For organisations seeking to do a better job on software projects, ScopeMaster is a software requirements analyser that solves the problems of poor quality requirements, it also reduces time wasted on Agile planning poker providing an objective size for user stories. Unlike all other software tools, ScopeMaster analyses the text of requirements to find defects and estimate size before the coding has started, resulting in less rework and shorter timelines.