Your programming project is at risk of scope creep. How can you prioritize feature requests to prevent it?

You can investigate the market, other competitors. What they promise their customers? What their customers are asking in support chats? Spend some time and money to get this information to get a list of potentially useful features

Your programming project is at risk of scope creep. How can you prioritize feature requests to prevent it? Start by clearly defining the project scope and requirements at the outset, ensuring all stakeholders are aligned. Use a prioritization framework like MoSCoW (Must have, Should have, Could have, Won't have) to categorize feature requests based on their importance and impact on the project's goals. Regularly communicate with stakeholders to manage expectations and update them on progress. Focus on delivering the core functionality first and consider additional features only if time and resources permit. This disciplined approach helps keep the project on track and within scope.

To find out the core features, I would contact the main stakeholders with a list of the requested features and ask them to assign a number from 0 to 10 to each one. By adding numbers to subjective features, it becomes much easier to understand which features are core and which are not. The sum of each answer will allow the team to better understand which features should be priorized. It is the same approach behind the planning poker sessions in Scrum, except in planning poker, people need to agree with the choosen task value, since they will be working together, while stakeholders may have wildly different opinions due to their backgrounds and do not need to agree.

One thing you can do to prevent your project from the risk of scope creep is to add features different or modify the project according to your imagination or experience so that no one can copy it. In today's world everyone knows something and you have the risk of your project so you can use a tool like Jira, Trello, or a dedicated feature request platform and clearly communicate that not all features can be included in the current project.

Involve key stakeholders in the prioritization process to ensure their needs are considered and to build consensus, maintaining regular communication to manage expectations. Evaluate how each feature request aligns with the overall project goals and objectives, and prioritize those that directly contribute to these goals while considering the potential risks and impact on the project timeline.

The best approach to consider the project’s cost is to charter the project the project’s requests into detailed parts and work on them individually and keep going from there while maintaining the time and resources of the project. This way, the resources of the projects will be efficiently used and the project’s cost will be lower.

When it comes to scope creep, the best way to fight it is through clear boundaries setup in a contract (or statement of work) up front. Make it clear of what is going to be done, for how much and how long things will take. Make sure to mark out your milestones, deliverables and set clear expectations for both parties. Then if the scope creeps, you have recourse to go back and point at the contract or ask for more money for going outside the initial scope. On a side note, I do try to give clients a bit of leeway for small asks (build that into your estimates) but let them know those asks will be limited.

One thing I would like to consider, in the case of scope creep and heavy new or change requests, is the requirments that meet the objectives of the application be given due importance. Because scope is increasing highly, but core perspective of making the application and achieving that goal should not be lost in making additions that may not add more value or be misaligned with the core objective.