MoSCoW: Requirements Prioritization Technique

The MoSCoW prioritization is a technique used in business analysis and project management, commonly known as MoSCoW analysis. MoSCoW is a legitimate technique to categorize features (or user stories) into precedence order – a technique to aid teams swiftly comprehend the customer’s view of what is vital for launch and what is not.

Once the requirements get frozen, business analyst are required to rank those requirements. MoSCow Prioritization plays a significant role in Agile Project Management. In case of Agile projects, it is vital to fathom the importance of prioritization as time is fixed, so prioritization is applied to requirements, tasks, products, user cases, etc.

Its name is derived from the first letters of each of the four respective priorities.

MoSCoW stands for:

• Must have (or Minimum Usable Subset)
• Should have
• Could have
• Won’t have (but Would like in future)
               

 ‘Must Haves ‘– these are the features that must be incorporated prior to the product launch.  It is essential to have transparency on this before the project kicks-in as this is the minimum scope for the product to be useful. These need to be fulfilled for achieving the primary objective of project.

‘Should Haves ‘- these are the features which are not critical to be launched, but are considered to be vital and have immense significance to the user. These requirements are extremely desirable but have less priority than Must requirements.

‘Could Haves ‘- these are the features that are nice to have and might be effectively incorporated without incurring over-burdening effort or cost. Basically a few easily fulfilled Could requirements in a delivery can intensify customer satisfaction for a little development cost, but these features will be immediately removed from scope if the project’s timelines are at risk.

‘Won’t Haves ‘– these are the features that have been demanded but are overtly excluded from scope for the current release, and may be encompassed in a forthcoming phase of development.

This practice is suitable in business development and when the business analyst is sure about business needs. Prioritization is basically carried out by all stakeholders i.e. the project sponsor, the project owner, and the Analysts. When we gather the requirements both functional as well as non-functional requirements are considered but the most essential aspect is to keep in mind to prioritize the non-functional requirements independently as the abstraction level of these non-functional requirements is different from that of the functional requirements.

Benefits of MoSCoW technique for Business Analysts

• Helps in determining the project scope
• Helps to plan the project deliverables
• Helps in managing requirements and resources
• Helps to prioritize requirements and provide the essential rank
• Helps to save time

    Conclusion:

MoSCoW technique plays a significant role in the entire project life cycle as when requirements have been prioritized they can be compared against the other planning aspects of project, such as project scope, quality, timescale and resources.

About Author:

Gurpreet kaur Gaga is a consultant in Systems Plus Pvt. Ltd. Within Systems Plus, She actively contributes to the areas of Technology and Information Security. She can be contacted at: gurpreetkaur.gaga@spluspl.com