Scope Management

Whoee, a "Vertical Community" for business rules professionals. I include this site here because business rules are often included in Requirements Specifications and Scope Documents. Pretty geeky and somewhat technical, but worth a look.

A Project Charter is a useful summary of project goals and business objectives. Great for making sure everyone is in agreement as to the nature of the project. This article provides a short overview of the Project Charter creation process.

This is an excellent article showing how high level prototypes can be used to clarify the project vision and identify and understand functional requirements. We highly recommend this site for anyone responsible for scoping or designing websites.

Joel Spolsky has written a series of articles on different topics related to web and software development. We recommend this four part article on writing functional specifications (what I call requirements specifications).

This is a baseline document that is used throughout the industry to describe the key principles and benefits of requirements management.

This is a detailed description of how a standard IEEE approach toward requirements management can be adjusted for use with use cases.

A nice article on using rapid prototyping to avoid scope creep on web development projects.

I've read lots of books on writing software requirements, and this one is the best. Mr. Wiegers writes in a simple, easy to follow style, explaining concepts clearly and concisely. He's just released the 2nd edition of this "classic." If you only have time for one book on requirements, this is the one.

This paper covers common scope issues, the benefits of clearly defining scope, and introduces five key tools and techniques you can use to define your project’s scope. It was written as a result of a presentation by Ivy Hooks to the Alamo Chapter of the Project Management Institute (PMI).

A nice article from The List Apart Folks on managing scope changes on web projects. The make a solid argument for documenting your change control process and explaining it to your clients.

This is a whitepaper from Telelogic, a software company that produces requirements management software. It's a pretty good introduction to the basics of requirements management and why we should care about it.

Jeremy Wright provides a nice overview of the web development process. He also provides examples of the core deliverables, a first as far as we know. Of course, we'll help you develop much better specification documents, but these samples aren't bad considering they're free.