Understanding Scope Creep: Causes and Prevention Strategies in Agile Sprints
Allison Bokone
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Last updated on September 30, 2024
Keeping projects on time and within budget is always a challenge and software development is no different. Today we’re going to look at scope creep in Agile projects—what impacts it has on sprints and how to prevent it.
Scope creep refers to when requirements change, expand, or get added during a sprint. In Agile software development, teams typically work in two to four-week sprints. The cycle starts with sprint planning, where the team goes through the backlog and chooses what features and bugs they will work on in that sprint.
As part of the planning discussions, engineers estimate how long they think each task will take so that the project manager can ensure work is allocated evenly and scoped to fit within the sprint. Once the sprint backlog is decided, the sprint starts and any new work that is introduced to the current sprint’s backlog is considered scope creep.
One cause of scope creep is poor estimates. Estimating software engineering work is difficult but taking the time to understand each requirement and collaborating to refine your estimation can go a long way in setting your sprint up for success.
Of course, to properly estimate a feature’s development, you must have that feature clearly defined. Project managers need to do some work ahead of sprint planning to understand and document customer requirements. Without proper software requirements, it’s difficult to understand the desired outcome of the sprint and even harder to accurately estimate how much work it will take to achieve that outcome.
Another common cause of scope creep is customer input. If your customers are regular Agile participants they may give feedback as development is happening. As they are observing in real-time, customers may request changes to features or think of new or different features that could better meet their needs. While this input is well intended, this kind of churn during an active sprint can be distracting and have a negative impact on the overall work being done.
Managing customer input effectively is essential to avoiding scope creep, and sometimes that means knowing how to say ‘no’ in a nice way. For some science-backed strategies on how developers can handle these situations with sensitivity, check out our article 4 Nicer, Science-Backed Ways for Developers to Say No“.
Identifying scope creep is the first step in learning how to prevent it. You can use Agile burndown (or burnup) charts to see where new items are introduced into your sprint and drill down into the sprint backlog for more details. You can also use historical views of your sprints over time to identify trends in your planning capabilities, such as if your estimates are accurate. If your estimates are often inaccurate, you might consider switching to a different estimating approach.
If you see a trend where work items committed to a sprint balloon into much larger work items or multiple sub-items, then your requirements might not be defined well enough when entering sprint planning. You can examine work item histories to see if they contain the same amount of requirements information at the beginning and end of the sprint. If features are being defined during the sprint and contain a much clearer definition at the end of the sprint that indicates a larger amount of work, then your project management team should have a discussion about how to improve requirements gathering and feature definition.
Once you’ve improved your estimating abilities, it will be easier to see when a sprint is getting overbooked during planning. If the work being considered is too much for a single sprint, the project manager can split tasks into subtasks that span multiple sprints or defer some tasks to a future sprint.
Finally, customer management and education might be necessary to prevent scope creep from your customers. If they are new to Agile, have your project manager explain the Agile process for software development and where their role as a customer fits into the process. Set expectations that new requests or significant changes to features will be put in the backlog or tentatively assigned to a future sprint to prevent throwing the current sprint off schedule.
While bugs are not always planned, there will always be bugs. Many teams do have an active backlog of medium to low priority bugs that can be planned and assigned to sprints the same as feature requests. But for high-priority bugs or issues happening in the production environment, fixes are needed immediately and can’t wait for sprint planning. Project managers can analyze bug trends and estimate how much of each sprint needs to be set aside for working on unplanned bugs. If the bug backlog is getting too big or the team is seeing an uptick in live issues then your team might consider dedicating an entire sprint to bug fixing and quality control work.
Assembla’s project management features can help your team accurately plan and execute their sprints. As the only cloud-based solution that hosts Git, SVN, and Perforce, Assembla enables project managers to work across tools to manage sprints from a single solution while engineers can continue using their favorite source control system.
Assembla supports time, points, and size (small, medium, large) based estimates for Tickets, allowing your team to use the estimating approach that works best for their sprint work. Detailed metrics and reporting not only give project managers real-time views of a project’s status but they enable analysis of how teams are performing over time, making it easier to identify where scope creep occurs and spot areas for improvement.
Sprint planning with Assembla offers the flexibility of Epics, Stories, Tasks, and Sub-Tasks. Task management is easy to configure and visible to all team members. Cardwalls and task boards help visualize your team’s work for day-to-day sprint tracking. To learn more about how project managers can get the most out of Assembla’s spring planning features, see Agile Project Management with Assembla.
If you’re ready to try cloud-based Agile Project Management, start a free 14 day trial of Assembla. Our team would love to talk with you about how Assembla can meet your Agile software development needs.
