Scopey Changey Management in Drupal 8

Scope management is critical to the success of software development efforts. Scope is the summary of things we want the software to accomplish - and a constant opportunity and negotiation around the details. These negotiations are a delicate dance of listening, reframing and striving for creative communication clarity.  

Add in change, which as they say, is the only constant. Toss in a dollop of differing technical approaches, and often times we’re crossing our fingers that what results will be palatable.

Throwing Drupal 8 into the mix  matters even more. With nearly 5 years of development and planning, an entirely new PHP standards-based layer, new front-end templating engine, and larger, more full featured ‘drupal core,’ Drupal 8 provides us an opportunity to talk about scope in a new way.

In this session, we’ll discuss the basics of scope and change management - ideas and techniques we’ve honed in managing hundreds of software projects.  We’ll then review how Drupal 8 shakes all of this up - which we see as a great opportunity to reimagine how the Drupal community considers scope. Finally, we’ll play some scenarios to pull everything together. For example, if we allow the Drupal 8 core to move us away from thinking about features as “modules,” what does that mean for the software we develop?