> Without a concrete plan it was really hard for the rest of us to help or say what's really important. And so began the feature creep for something that was su

> Without a concrete plan it was really hard for the rest of us to help or say what's really important. And so began the feature creep for something that was suppose to be a quick prototype ended up being whole implementation which took half a year to get first somewhat working version. This is interesting. Every example of scope creep I've run into has been a case of too many cooks in the kitchen, or an over-zealous "thinker" (as opposed to a "doer"). If I want to avoid scope creep I limit the scope of the project to as few people as possible and get them as close to the users/market as possible. It sounds more to me like everyone did get their two cents in, but not in the correct way, and this lone developer was formulating the requirements based on way too many informal channels rather than one structured one.