During the initial design phase of our capstone project, we laid out what we wanted to accomplish in the limited amount of time we had. Our scope at the beginning was actually too large so we cut it down before we began development to only the essential customer needs. For example, our project was a smart cast that was designed to monitor the healing process of a fracture through sensors. We initially had planned the use of 4-5 sensors, but we ended up only going with 2 for both hardware limitations and focusing on essential customer needs. This did not mean we didn’t experience scope creep later in the project. Our PM wanted us to develop an algorithm to evaluate the sensor data after it was collected. Development time was limited enough, so rather than make any promises, we told our pm that we would only develop such an algorithm if development of the product was finished ahead of schedule. We felt we handled that situation right and prevented a serious issue with scope creep. However, there is one situation regarding scope creep that, in hindsight, we should have included in the initial design phase. The way we were collecting data was through an sd card embedded in the hardware on the cast, but we had no method of time-stamping it. Our pm wanted us to timestamp the data, so we planned to add a RTC (real time clock) component. The issue here was that the circuit and software flow diagram were already created in the design phase, and materials had already been bought. So we had to rewrite the software, rearrange the circuit, and ended up going slightly over-budget. In hindsight, I wish I had thought of the timestamp issue in the initial design phase and prevented this ordeal.