Requirements Assessment. Often the first process of many development cycles. The first of a linear sequence of processes within a cycle. Does it really need to be a linear sequential process? It does not! A current project was framed under a typical agile development cycle. However, when it came time to test, stake holders struggled to work with features without the entire production application as a reference. This generated a lot of additional code to proxy missing features and pushed the project past budget and delivery dates. I think part of the problem was the stake holders were not getting hands on frequently and early enough to constructively drive requirement refinements. So the solution was to stretch the requirements assessment over the feature development cycle and redefine the cycle itself by features. This allowed feature testing and approval much sooner. By the time the next feature cycle would start, there would be a near production ready code base to build on. Next time you find yourself thinking the project may need to be re-scoped, think about broadening the requirement assessment period over an entire cycle.