11/16/2019 How to effectively scope your software projects

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4 DECEMBER 2017 / #AGILE

How to effectively scope

your software projects

by Angela Zhang

Since starting my career as a software engineer, I’ve learned that

scoping is one of the hardest things to get right. Unfortunately, CS
programs in universities don’t really teach you how to scope
projects. So here’s my attempt at consolidating what I’ve learned on
this topic.

Scoping isn’t something that you can spend a day on during the
project and never think about again. In fact, to scope a project
accurately, you need to pay attention throughout the project
during:

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11/16/2019 How to effectively scope your software projects

1. The planning phase: the early stages of de ning the project Menu
and its goals

2. The scoping phase: the time when most people think about
scoping. This is where you try to list out the work that needs
to be done given the project goals, and estimate how much
time will be required to do them.

3. The execution phase: when you are actually implementing

the project.

The planning phase

One of the most important things to do during this time is to de ne
very speci c goals for the project. For example, instead of “improve
X to be more scalable and performant,” a better and more speci c
goal might be to “improve X by adding unit tests, supporting 20K
queries per second, and reducing capped mean of user latency to <=
200ms.”

Having very speci c goals allows you to ruthlessly cut anything that
does not contribute to these goals, so that you don’t suffer from
feature creep. Along these lines, you might also consider explicitly
de ning anti-goals, and separating must-haves and nice-to-haves.

Minimize the batch size of the project by (1) setting up clear

milestones and checkpoints for the project, and (2) making it easy to
launch only part of the project. Not only does this help break down
the project, but it will also allow the team to pause or cut the project
early if another, higher priority task comes up.

De-risk the project as soon as possible. Two common ways of de-

risking a project include (1) working on the riskiest parts upfront,
and (2) prototyping the riskiest parts using dummy data and/or
scaffolding. Whenever a new open-source system or external
service is used, that usually represents a big risk.
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11/16/2019 How to effectively scope your software projects

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Don’t optimize for total amount of work done. Instead, optimize for
total amount of impact over time. Once you’ve gotten the riskiest
part out of the way, prioritize working on the part of the project that
would result in the highest amount of impact immediately.

Here’s one way to think about this: plot the impact of a project over
time, where the Y axis is impact, and the X axis is time. At the start
of the project, the impact is 0%, and at the end of the project, the
impact is 100%. You want to maximize the area under the curve by
doing high ROI tasks rst.

Try to avoid rewriting big systems from scratch as much as

possible. When doing a rewrite, we tend to (1) underestimate how
much work it would be, (2) be tempted to add new features and
improvements, and (3) build an overly complicated system because
we are too focused on all the shortcomings of the rst system.

Instead of doing a big rewrite, consider incrementally replacing

subsystems. Have good abstraction layers that support swapping
out one part of the old system at a time, so you don’t need to wait
for everything to be done to test the new system.

The scoping phase

Only the engineers writing the code should be the ones
scoping the tasks. Not their managers, not the PM, or the
key stakeholders in the company.

Resist the temptation to under-scope. Be honest about how

long tasks will take, not how long you or someone else (such
as your manager or the Go To Market team) wants them to
take.

Divide the project into small tasks, each taking two days or
less. When you have tasks that are scoped to “roughly 1
k” h f d ki l b did ’
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11/16/2019 How to effectively scope your software projects

week,” they often end up taking longer because you didn’t

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enumerate all the subtasks that you might need to do.

De ne measurable milestones to get to the project goal.

Schedule each with a speci c calendar date representing
when you expect this milestone to be reached. Then,
establish some sort of external accountability on these
milestones by, for example, committing them to your
manager and setting up milestone checkins.

Think of project time estimates as probability distributions,

not best-case scenarios. Instead of telling someone that a
feature will be nished in 6 weeks, tell them something like
“there’s a 50% likelihood of nishing the feature in 4 weeks,
and a 90% chance we’d nish it in 8 weeks.” This tends to
force people to be more realistic.

Add buffer to account for: (1) Dev time != calendar time, due
to meetings, interviews, and holidays. I usually multiply the
dev time by 1.5 to get to the calendar time. (2) Unexpected
project tasks time, since there are always tasks that you
didn’t realize you need to do until much later, such as
refactoring old code, debugging seemingly unexplainable
behaviors, adding tests. The more experienced you are at
scoping, the smaller this multiplier would get.

Use historical data. Keep track of whether you’ve tended to

overscope or underscope projects in the past (most people
tend to underscope). Adjust your scoping accordingly.

Keep in mind that 2X the number of people does not mean

1/2X the dev time, as a result of communication overheads,
ramp up time, etc.

Consider timeboxing open-ended parts of the project.

Instead of “ nd the best stream processing framework for

this system,” which can take months of research and

prototyping, timebox it to “ nd a suitable streaming
i f ki k” U j d h
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11/16/2019 How to effectively scope your software projects

processing framework in a week.” Use your judgement here

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to balance this against incurring long term operational
overhead.

The execution phase

Re-scope regularly during the project execution. For each task,
track how much time you estimated the task would take, then how
long it actually took you to complete it. Do this for every
measurable milestone. If your scoping is off by 50% for the rst
parts of the project, odds are your scoping will also be off by 50%
for the rest of the project.

Use milestones to answer “how’s the project going?” As engineers,

it’s tempting to answer “it’ll be done by next week” or “until end of
this month.” But these types of vague answers tend to create
projects that are always 2 weeks away from being nished. Instead,
use the (re-scoped) milestones to give a concrete answer based on
how much work is left.

If the project slips, make sure everyone understands why the

project has slipped. Then, develop a realistic and revised version of
the project plan. Dropping the project or cutting it short is a
potential option that should be considered. Read more about The
Sunk Cost Fallacy if you are curious why people tend to bias against
cutting a project half way.

Giving credit where credit is due, a lot of information here comes

from talking to engineers and managers like Spencer Chan and
Nikhil Garg, reading books like The Effective Engineer by Edmond
Lau, and personally scoping lots of projects with varying degrees of
accuracy.

Lastly, if I’m being honest, I am by no means an expert on scoping

and I still regularly make mistakes like not following some of the
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11/16/2019 How to effectively scope your software projects
and I still regularly make mistakes like not following some of the
best practices above. I just gured I would document my learnings Menu
so far so I can refer back to this in the future.

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engineering, processes, and backend systems.

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