Professional Documents
Culture Documents
israr.rehman@gmail.com, sajidkhattak_1984@yahoo.com,
{a.rauf, arshad.ali}@nu.edu.pk
ABSTRACT
Scope management is among one of the most important
knowledge areas of software project management
which if not managed carefully can lead the projects
towards failure. A well defined and well managed
scope is very important for a qualitative, cost effective
and timely completion of the project. In this paper we
discussed the role and impact of the scope on two very
broadly accepted methodologies for software
development. The two methodologies adopt different
techniques for the development of software. How they
are different from each other and how they adopt and
manage the scope in there development process are
discussed. Moreover, the replacement of traditional
software development methods by agile software
development methods in terms of cost, resources and
time are also a part of this work.
Keywords
Scope Management, Agile Development Methods,
Traditional Development Methods.
INTRODUCTION
To develop software in software industry, the software
development team follows a strategy that consists of
processes methods and tools.
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for
personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies
are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that
copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. To copy
otherwise, to republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists,
requires prior specific permission and/or a fee.
NSEC10, 04-OCT-2010, Rawalpindi, Pakistan Copyright 2010 ACM
978-1-4503-0026-1/10/10 ...$10.00.
RELATED WORK
A lot of work has been carried out on both traditional
and agile software development methods, especially
traditional methods are under heavy considerations
from the last few decades. In contrast, agile methods
are still an open area of research because these methods
are known to be a novice technique adopted for
software development. Agility means quick adoptions
to the change of requirements and surrounding
environments. Conventional process is inonolithic and
fat which makes hard to change. Agile software process
is composed of a number of light weight processes
which have small unit of size [6]. The important idea is
that process design is based on time rather than volume.
Therefore, large-volume of development should be
divided into multiple, say, versions so that they can be
iteratively and/or concurrently developed [11].
In [2], [3], [7], [12], [13] the reasons for adopting the
agile methods over the traditional methods are
explained. Also [6], [7] describe the advantages of the
agile software development methods over the
traditional software development methods for the
successful completion of the project. Scope
management is one of the most important knowledge
areas and has a very profound impact on both of these
software development methods, but work done on
scope management in both of these methods is not as
much as it should be.
TRADITIONAL DEVELOPMENT
METHODS
According to [6] traditional software development
methods are plan driven and they used command and
control approach to project development. By using
traditional methods complex software system can be
developed in a sequential phase wise manner where all
the requirements are gathered at the beginning. Software
design is completed next and finally master design is
implemented to produce high quality software.
Traditional software development methods involve very
disciplined and deliberate planning and control methods
[15]. With this approach, distinct project life cycle
phases are easily recognizable. Tasks are completed one
after another in an orderly sequence, requiring a
significant part of the project to be planned up front. For
example, in a construction project, the team needs to
determine requirements, design and plan for the entire
building, and not just incremental components, in order
to understand the full scope of the effort. Under these
traditional approaches the project managers are
responsible to make development plans. Because of the
sequential development of the software the traditional
models have some limitations. One of the most
important of these limitations is that these models
assume that all project requirements must be gathered at
the beginning of the project [15]. When a large and
complex system is going to develop it is not possible to
gather all the requirements before launching the project.
Thus changes will be made in the requirements during
the later phases of the development process which is not
supported by the traditional models. Such circumstances
definitely affect the project scope and the project will
require more time, more cost for the sake of good
quality.
Analysis
Design
Figure 1.Traditional software development model.
Different phases of traditional software development
methods are described in Figure 1. Traditional software
development methods follow the traditional software
Analysis
Figure 3. Software development methods.
Design
A g ile M e t h o d s
Code
SCOPE MANAGEMENT
Scope is one of the most important knowledge area in
software project management defined by different
processes that limit and control the work included in a
project. Scope management mainly consists of five
processes [5]. Scope in software projects is defined in
the form of specification documents which include all
the work involved in creating the product of the project
and the processes used to create the product. Thus
scope management includes the processes involved in
defining and controlling what to include or not in the
project. Each process include in the scope has a set of
input and a set of output. Each process also has a set of
tools and techniques used to convert input into output
[4], [5].
Scope management also defines the baseline for
performance measurements and for controlling the
project and communicating clear responsibilities [8].
Thus it defines the work break down structure for the
project which is an outcome oriented analysis of the
work involved in a project that defines the total scope
of the project. It is a foundation document in project
management because it provides the basis for planning
and managing the project schedule, budget and requests
for any changes or deviations from plans. The WBS is
developed in the form of an inverted tree structure,
organized by objectives.
SCOPE IN TRADITIONAL
METHODS
COMPARASION
Scope management in agile methods gives very
prominent results as compare to traditional methods as
shown in figure 4. Scope management in agile
methods require high level requirement and also accept
changes and reduce unwanted changes and also follow
the iteration plan. These properties of scope
management guarantee the on time and within budget
and good quality delivery of software product. On other
hand Scope managed in traditional methods require
detail requirements which results in comprehensive
documentation.
REFERENCES
[1]
[2]
[3]
[4]
[5]
[6]
[7]
[8]
[9]
[10]
[11]
[12]
CONCLUSION
Scope management is a major factor for the successful
completion of the software development process in both
[13]
[14]
[15]
[16]
[17]