This calculator will help you to understand the significant value that ScopeMaster can bring to your software development work.

The calculations are based on US average costs for onshore development.

Very Significant Benefits

You may be surprised at the significant benefits achievable from using ScopeMaster. In short, this is mainly because approximately 35% of effort on most software projects is a consequence of rework due to incomplete, changing or growing requirements that cause an extended schedule.  By improving your requirements quality early, much of the rework cost and delay cost can be avoided.

Also the productivity of your QA work can be significantly improved as we saw in this case study:

Scopemaster finds problems early , before they become expensive to fix

Problems with requirements tend to be the most costly if they are undetected until later stages of the project.  It is very important to identify defects early, before the cost to fix them balloons.

ScopeMaster’s return on investment estimate is based on three principles:

  1. Better quality of requirements early, avoids rework
  2. Clearer requirements leads to reduced project risk
  3. Better understanding of size, improves estimation, negotiation and project control

Benefits Details

Benefits

Finding requirements defects

Without ScopeMaster, it typically takes 2 person hours of effort ($100) to find and fix a problem during the requirements stage.  The bigger the project, the harder it is to find and fix requirements problems.   ScopeMaster typically finds 1-3 genuine defects per user story in seconds, that’s $100 – $300 of manual work avoided.  Average $150 saving per user story.

Knowing the size

If you know the functional size of a software endeavour before you start, you can plan and manage more efficiently,  allocating just the right resources and time to get the software delivered.  Another way of looking at this is the ability to negotiate the cost of software effectively.  Just knowing the size at the proposal stage allows you to negotiate a fairer price for the development work (saving at least 10% , around $100 per CFP) or about $500 per story.  To be conservative however, we prefer  just $300 benefit per user story.

Others Benefits

Reduced rework

Typically a software project will spend as much as 40% of dev/test effort, reworking previously visited functionality due to requirements volatility.  Most of this is avoided if you use ScopeMaster up front.  Saving $thousands.

Avoiding costly change requests

There is a considerable burden to projects of introducing late breaking changes, using ScopeMaster is more likely to avoid the need for these.  Saving $thousands.

Reducing bugs that affect production

Typically 20% of all production bugs are due to poor or missing requirements.  A production bug typically costs many thousands to fix, and can have a wider impact on the reputation and success of the organisation.  Using ScopeMaster will reduce the likelihood of these reaching production, potentially saving $thousands

Reduce Cost of Measuring size

The typical cost to measure size functional size manually is about $10 per FP, or about $50 per requirement, with ScopeMaster you can do this so much faster, Typical saving is $40 per user story.

Costs

ScopeMaster Access

From $4 -$8 per user story.

Working with ScopeMaster

This is the effort expended by an analyst using ScopeMaster to get your requirements into shape.

Typically 30 minutes or  $25 per user story

Summary Benefits / Costs

Typically: ($450+ $100) / $30

It all adds up to a 15x return on investment.   And since ScopeMaster is so fast at analysing user stories, you get these benefits rapidly.  

A Case Study’s Dramatic Benefits

One case study has shown a dramatic improvement in the productivity of user story grooming activities:

Faster quality work

“This is really neat….other than general readability, it’s the only static analysis tool for requirements that I have ever seen”

Capers Jones, Author and Software Metrics expert
University of Dayton Research Institute

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.

Joshua Handwerker Team Lead/System Architect, Software Systems Software & Sensor Systems Division, University of Dayton Research Institute

I would be shocked if this didn’t improve development team productivity by at least 10%.

Lonnie Franks, Consultant Project Assurance

This is of great potential benefit for the requirements community as well as the sizing community.  I share your excitement.

Professor Alain Abran, Department of software engineering and information technology - Ecole de technologie superieure - University of Québec (Canada)

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.

Professor Alain Abran, Department of software engineering and information technology - Ecole de technologie superieure - University of Québec (Canada)

It is much harder to remove defects from requirements and design that it is from source code.  But if those defects are not removed prior to testing, testing itself cannot find them.

Capers Jones, The Economics of Software Quality

Scopemaster doesn’t just help find the requirements defects but helps educate authors to prevent them in future!

Lonnie Franks, Project Assurance Expert

Its amazing that you have come up with the right set of functional requirements.

Professor Alain Abran, Department of software engineering and information technology - Ecole de technologie superieure - University of Québec (Canada)

Using ScopeMaster, not only I did I find and fix 150 defects in 2 days, it was actually fun to use!

Lonnie Franks, Project Assurance Expert
Mike Sanders Agile Project Manager

“…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”

Mike Sanders, Agile Project Manager

“I think it’s amazing, it does so many things. Its a great tool!”

Linda Westfall , Author of Handbook of Software Engineering