Interesting article on Scope Management throughout the SW Development lifecycle (waterfall):
https://www.forbes.com/sites/quora/2017/12/14/what-are-some-best-practices-for-scoping-software-development-projects/#127b01df1bca
There are tips / items for several project phases above. For example:
Quoting:
"One of the most important things to do during this time is to define very specific goals for the project. For example, instead of “improve X to be more scalable and performant”, a better and more specific goal might be to “improve X by adding unit tests, supporting 20K queries per second, and reducing capped mean of user latency to <= 200ms”. Having very specific goals allows you to ruthlessly cut anything that does not contribute to these goals, so you don’t suffer from feature creep. Along these lines, you might also consider explicitly defining anti-goals, and separating must-haves and nice-to-haves.
Minimize the batch size of the project by (1) setting up clear milestones and checkpoints for the project and (2) making it easy to launch only part of the project. Not only does this help break down the project, it will also allow the team to pause or cut the project early, should another higher priority task come up.
De-risk the project as soon as possible. Two common ways of de-risking a project include (1) working on the riskiest parts upfront and (2) prototype the riskiest parts using dummy data and/or scaffolding. Whenever a new open-source system or external service is used, that usually represents a big risk.
Don’t optimize for total amount of work done, instead, optimize for total amount of impact over time. Once you’ve gotten the riskiest part out of the way, prioritize working on the part of the project that would result in the highest amount of impact immediately."
