Scope as a Leading Indicator for Managing Software Development

Historically there has been a significant problem with scope on software projects. This study looks to computational intelligence to facilitate the monitoring of scope to provide useful information to project managers. Software projects are difficult to manage with an alarming number of projects ending as highly expensive failures. A recent study of complex projects sponsored by the Project Management Institute found that "soft issues" such as "gut feelings" might provide early warning signs on problem projects. That study suggested that additional measures beyond cost and time must be found to identify project problems. Adding scope as an additional constraint to ascertain project status can be done through the use of Computational Intelligence (CI) tools. Scope for information technology projects has properties of imprecision and vagueness, therefore fuzzy logic would be an appropriate CI tool for monitoring scope. Other papers have illustrated how Zadeh's fuzzy data collector could be used to gather scope status as a practical application of the "computing with words" paradigm. A major benefit of monitoring scope is that scope status can be a leading indicator for managing software projects. Traditional project management measures time and cost which are lagging indicators, representing resources that are unrecoverable once spent. If the status of the scope constraint is collected and correctly analyzed before the expenditure of other fixed resources, there is the potential for scope to be a predictor, or leading indicator. One analysis technique would be to adjust the status for tasks on the critical path using linguistic hedges. By adding scope as a leading indicator, a faster recognition and response to problems in software development should increase project success.