Here’s a real-life example of how scope creep can absolutely kill a project you’re working on. I tend to find that this particular phenomenon tends to take hold of my projects on a regular basis, and I’ve been actively trying to combat it for quite a while now.
The project in question was a very simple installation of TwitterFeed on my blog. In my recent rediscovery of Twitter, I’ve noticed lots of folks seem to be auto-creating tweets when new posts go up… and quite frankly, I wanted in on that action. 
First, a description of the problem. The scope creep I talk about tends to come up when a simple project begins to show you options that you just have to could implement. Each option can really be a project in and of itself, and as a result the original project (which should have taken 10 minutes) has taken you the whole night and you’re up until one in the morning working on it and then blogging about the problem! 
Here are the basic instructions for setting up TwitterFeed:
- Step One: Decide you want TwitterFeed
- Step Two: Provide OpenID credentials
- Step Three: Start using TwitterFeed
- DONE!
Here is the example of what happens when you let your curiosity about the extendability of the same plugin get the better of you. Instead of getting this all to work as expected, it causes an evening of frustration.
- Step One: Decide you want TwitterFeed
- Step Two: Discover that TwitterFeed uses OpenID
- Step Three: Read the OpenID tutorial and discover that you can host your own OpenID server
- Step Four: Download the OpenID code
- Step Five: Read the roll-your-own-OpenID tutorial and discover that you should use OpenSSL
- Step Six: Do trial and error until you find a way to actually get the OpenSSL working
- Step Seven: After 2 hours of searching, submit a support ticket and give up on the SSL for now
- Step Eight: Go get something to drink. Something strong
- Step Nine: Configure phpmyid
- Step Ten: Add code to your site.
- Step Eleven: Realize that it doesn’t work and use a regular OpenID account until you get more time…
- DONE!
I rest my case. So let this be a lesson to you:
- Figure out what you need to get done
- Get it done
- Make notes of the other options along the way
- DONE!
1 response so far ↓
1 Dan Ballard // Feb 11, 2008 at 3:52 am
Ha, this almost happened to me. I was looking at twitter stuff, I think twitter feed included and rolling my own OpenID system just last week… Right after I DID roll my own Jabber server just to talk to people on Google Talk (because why sign up for the free servive when you can roll your own?)
I decided against the OpenID server for the moment and just used my livejournal account as my OpenID and then after all that reading and poking around decided I didn’t want to use twitterfeed because it didn’t really do what I want.
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