Keeping online projects on target

If you’re not careful, “feature creep” can cause a project to get buried under additional requirements, resulting in big delays and a lousy outcome. Photo by wilderdom

Web development and design blog Six Revisions has a fantastic article on how to prevent “feature creep,” otherwise known as the tendency for managers and clients to tack on additional features to a project at later phases, resulting in significant delays, broken code and –often– an overall crappier result.

The number one solution, according to Six Revisions: Dedicate enough time to requirements gathering and making sure stakeholders understand what the outcome of the project should be. If something is an essential feature, it should be documented from the get-go.

From one of the tips:

Be clear on what it is, exactly, you’re developing for them. Don’t promise a grand, exciting, but ambiguous/ambitious end result. Instead of giving broad generalizations such as “I’ll be developing a search engine optimized website”, try to outline the deliverables that you will provide

Along with my previous post this morning about Jakob Nielsen’s top 10 usability sins, this is another article you should read if you have anything to do with projects for your news site.

Six Revisions: Eight Tips on How to Manage Feature Creep

[Via Digg]

Author: Danny Sanchez

Danny Sanchez is the Audience Development Manager at Tribune's Sun-Sentinel.com and OrlandoSentinel.com. Danny has been with Tribune since 2005 in a variety of editorial, digital and product development roles in Hartford, Orlando and Fort Lauderdale. He has also previously worked in the newsrooms of the Tampa Bay Times and The Miami Herald. View all posts by Danny Sanchez