How to Reduce Engineering Scope

A lot of developers think that code is the thing they sell. That’s not true. I learned one lesson about being a great software engineer: reducing scope. Scope creep is the root of project management evil, and software developers are historically bad at estimations. Thus, our only remedy is to make the project smaller — by reducing the scope. Agile software development has taught us the importance of early and continuous delivery. As a result, the agile principles tell us to reduce the scope, ship our product in a minimum viable product, and work in incremental change. <h1>Understanding the Why</h1> As an engineer, your job is understanding the problem (NOT the proposed solution). Customers think they know what they want. Often, they don’t know what they want. Many customers will try to “self-diagnose” a problem in the market and ask you to implement the solution immediately. A product manager once asks me to add a new row in our internal database to detect anomalies in a cron job. After asking her “Why” and the problems she encountered, we understood the problem was not the anomaly in the database but the huge memory we needed to acquire during the job run. A simple logic change within the code ended solves the problems. <a href="https://levelup.gitconnected.com/how-to-reduce-engineering-scope-af21776c0e9a">Read More</a>