Chapter 2 · Practice 3 of 4
Write down what the project will not do
Why it matters
A short out of scope list protects you all year. When an examiner asks "does it handle payments?" at the mid evaluation, you can point to the proposal that said, from the start, that payments were out of scope.
Typical non-goals for a student project:
- Payments, invoicing or real money handling.
- Support for every language, platform or device.
- Production-scale load, high availability or 24/7 operation.
- Integration with systems you cannot get access to.
Non-goals are not an admission of weakness. They show you understand the difference between a project and a product, and they keep your must list believable.
Do
- Add an explicit out of scope list to the proposal
- Agree the list with your supervisor
Avoid
- Leaving the boundaries for examiners to guess