The IT Pro Podcast: Eliminating Scope Drift

When you’re working on a large-scale software development project, especially in a large enterprise, it’s easy for the initial goals of the project to become confused over time. As goals drift further and further from their starting point, timelines can slip and project effectiveness can be compromised.

This type of scope creep can be seriously detrimental to organizations, but fortunately the software engineering community has been working hard for years on strategies to help limit its spread within organizations. Jess Cregg, Developer Advocate at LaunchDarkly, returns to the podcast this week to discuss some of those strategies — as well as how sometimes scope slipping can be beneficial.

Strong points

“It’s really easy for that to happen, because as soon as it’s just one more thing, things can get out of control. And the “just one more thing” rule doesn’t usually end up encroaching on the main time that you frame for your project, for the thing that you’re developing; this falls into the time you have allocated either to reduce technical debt or the time you have allocated to perfecting your overall process – that 20% time we talk about in DevOps.

“Range drift can be very powerful from an incident perspective. I mean, if we look at game days and chaos engineering, the idea of creating crash days where things go wrong in a way that’s beyond your reach to fix, is a fascinating way to find out how well things fit together. So I think it’s a really good way to use scope drift to strengthen your organization. »

“One of the really encouraging things that we’re seeing right now – and I’ve seen this a lot on Twitter – is that a lot of senior engineers are developing this kind of sense, this kind of reflex, to understand, ‘Wait wait a second do we actually need to build this I remember seeing someone recently talk about how being a senior engineer is basically having endless conversations about why you shouldn’t do something.

Read the full transcript here.