Scope creep
Scope creep – also known as feature creep – is the gradual, uncontrolled expansion of a project’s scope beyond its original boundaries and specification.
Individual additions may be small and reasonable in isolation. No single change justifies pushing back. But the cumulative effect is a project that grows significantly in size and complexity, without a corresponding adjustment to budget, timeline, or resources.
Scope creep is a leading cause of project overruns, quality degradation, and delivery failures.
Scope creep can originate through change requests and poorly defined requirements that leave room for ambiguous interpretation.
Effective mitigations include maintaining a clearly documented and agreed scope baseline, establishing a formal change control process through which new change requests are properly evaluated and either, and practising timeboxing to create a boundary around what can be included in a given iteration.
The related concept of software bloat describes the downstream symptom in the delivered product, where accumulated scope creep results in software that is larger and more complex than is required to fulfil its objectives.