## Definition **Deriving scope from goals** is the discipline of refusing to accept a requester's stated *solution* as the specification, and instead working backward collaboratively from the business *goal* the solution was meant to serve. Gojko Adzic treats this as the first move of effective specification. ## Solution-as-spec is the default mistake Requesters arrive with answers, not problems: "add a CSV export button," "give me a nightly email." Each is a guessed solution to an unstated goal. If you implement it verbatim, you may ship a perfectly built thing that nobody needed. The goal behind "nightly email" might be "I need to know when stock runs low" — better served by an alert than a digest. The cure is to ask *why* until you reach a goal that no longer sounds like a feature, then derive the minimal scope that satisfies it. ## Why this is the hard part Fred Brooks' verdict still holds: "the hardest single part of building a software system is deciding precisely what to build." No amount of coding speed rescues you from building the wrong thing. The agentic era sharpens this rather than softening it — an agent will build the wrong feature faster and more thoroughly than a junior ever could. ## A front-end discipline This work happens *before* a spec is written, not during. The output of goal-derivation is the scope; the output of [[Specification by Example]] is the detail within that scope. Skipping the first step means your examples faithfully specify a feature that should not exist. | Stage | Question | Artifact | |---|---|---| | Goal derivation | Why does this matter? | Agreed scope | | Specification | What exactly happens? | Examples / criteria | | Implementation | How is it built? | Code | ## The collaborative seat Goals are rarely visible to one person. The business owner knows the *why*, the developer knows the *cost*, the tester knows the *edges*. This is why goal-derivation lives naturally inside the [[Three Amigos]] conversation rather than in a solo requirements document. ## Related - [[Spec-Driven Development]] - [[Three Amigos]] - [[Specification by Example]]