Previous chapter: 9 Workshops. In a DSDM project where time has been fixed, it is vital to understand the relative importance of the work to be done in order to make progress and keep to deadlines. User Stories are a very effective way of defining requirements in an Agile style; see later chapter on Requirements and User Stories for more information.
MoSCoW is a prioritisation technique for helping to understand and manage priorities. The letters stand for:. The use of MoSCoW works particularly well on projects. It also overcomes the problems associated with simpler prioritisation approaches which are based on relative priorities:. These may be defined using some of the following:. If there is some way around it, even if it is a manual and painful workaround, then it is a Should Have or a Could Have requirement.
One way of differentiating a Should Have requirement from a Could Have is by reviewing the degree of pain caused by the requirement not being met, measured in terms of business value or numbers of people affected. These are the requirements that provide the main pool of contingency, since they would only be delivered in their entirety in a best case scenario. When a problem occurs and the deadline is at risk, one or more of the Could haves provide the first choice of what is to be dropped from this timeframe.
These are requirements which the project team has agreed will not be delivered as part of this timeframe. They are recorded in the Prioritised Requirements List where they help clarify the scope of the project. This avoids them being informally reintroduced at a later date. This also helps to manage expectations that some requirements will simply not make it into the Deployed Solution, at least not this time around.
In a traditional project, all requirements are treated as Must Have, since the expectation is set from the start that everything will be delivered and that typically time the end date will slip if problems are encountered. DSDM projects have a very different approach; fixing time, cost and quality and negotiating features. By the end of Foundations, the end dates for the project and for the first Project Increment are confirmed. In order to meet this commitment to the deadline, DSDM projects need to create contingency within the prioritised requirements.
