Effective Software Project Management

Scope Change Management

Why have this section in this chapter since you assume requirements, functions, and features are completely and clearly defined and documented? Well, things aren’t always what they seem to be. Even though your assumption holds, the world doesn’t stand still for you. The business world changes and some of those changes can affect your project. So despite the fact that you weren’t expecting any changes, you shouldn’t be overly concerned that they will happen. These changes will generally have more of an impact on the Linear SDPM strategy for the Standard Waterfall model than for the Linear SDPM strategy for the Rapid Development Waterfall model. The next sections discuss just why this is so.

Warning

The customer has a very different view of change than does the developer. Customers tend to view change as simpler than the developer. They don’t see the system ramifications for what appears to be a very simple request. Developers, on the other hand, see all sorts of ghosts and goblins in even the simplest of requests. The request can indirectly have an impact on all uses of the variables or parameters that are directly affected. The design is compromised and must be revised. The database design and layout is affected because of longer character strings resulting from the change request, and so on.

Standard Waterfall

A change at any point will have reverberations that will be felt all through to the end of the project life cycle. The later the change appears ...