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Showing posts from December, 2006

Priorities & MoSCoW

One of the most important tasks a PM has on a software development project (maybe in all projects) is setting priorities. Usually time and money is shorter than everybody would like and you have to choose what to develop and what not to develop. It takes communication skills, a lot of negotiation and, at the end; everybody is a little bit frustrated… If your team is developing software iteratively and incrementally (and you should… but that’s a theme for another post), you have to prioritize each iteration sub-scope. To make scope more clear, at my company we adopt the MoSCoW list. I believe it originally has roots on DSDM (although it is used similarly on SCRUM, UP and it has elements of Cockburn’s actor-goal list) and it is a very powerful tool. Simply stated, it is a list of requirements (or actor-goals, or use case titles…) each one prioritized with a letter MSCW (Must, Should, Could and Won’t – that’s the origin of MoSCoW list name). I simplify the explanation to my clients, key-u