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The Importance of requirements scope

Software development is notorious for going over budget and being late. Scope creep, the tendency to try to do everything, the intention of completing all tasks within a specified timeline, sends us off on tasks not directly related to the immediate goal. Furthermore, human nature tends to lead us to work on those aspects of the problem that intrigue us the most. For programmers, the focus tends to be programming. For interface designers, the focus tends to be the user interface. For database administrators, the focus tends to relational database design.
Focus on the requirements at hand and work one step at a time. Measure your progress of the individual steps against the larger objective in the project.

Systems Development Lifecycle Framework

Preliminary Analysis: The objective of phase 1 is to conduct a preliminary analysis, propose alternative solutions, describe costs and benefits and submit a preliminary plan with recommendations.
Conduct the preliminary analysis: in this step, you need to find out the organization's objectives and the nature and scope of the problem under study. Even if a problem refers only to a small segment of the organization itself then you need to find out what the objectives of the organization itself are. Then you need to see how the problem being studied fits in with them. Propose alternative solutions: In digging into the organization's objectives and specific problems, you may have already covered some solutions. Alternate proposals may come from interviewing employees, clients , suppliers, and/or consultants. You can also study what competitors are doing. With this data, you will have three choices:
  1. leave the system as is,
  2. improve it,
  3. or develop a new system.