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MoSCoW is a prioritisation technique used in business analysis and software development to reach a common understanding with stakeholders on the importance they place on the delivery of each requirement - also known as ''MoSCoW prioritisation'' or ''MoSCoW analysis''.

The capital letters in ''MoSCoW'' stand for:

The o's in MoSCoW are added simply to make the word pronounceable, and are often left lower case to indicate that they don't stand for anything. While some suggest it should be ''MuSCoW'' (to more accurately reflect the words behind the acronym), MoSCoW is preferred as it is more easily remembered as the capital city of the Russian Federation.

Background

This use of ''MoSCoW'' was first developed by Dai Clegg of Oracle UK Consulting; in ''CASE Method Fast-Track: A RAD Approach''

although he subsequently donated the Intellectual Property Rights to the Dynamic Systems Development Method (DSDM) Consortium.

MoSCoW is often used with timeboxing, where a deadline is fixed so that the focus can be on the most important requirements, and as such is seen as a core aspect of rapid application development (RAD) software development processes, such as Dynamic Systems Development Method (DSDM) and agile software development techniques.

Explanation

All requirements are important, but they are prioritised to deliver the greatest and most immediate business benefits early. Developers will initially try to deliver all the ''M'', ''S'' and ''C'' requirements but the ''S'' and ''C'' requirements will be the first to go if the delivery timescale looks threatened.

The plain English meaning of the MoSCoW words has value in getting customers to understand what they are doing during prioritisation in a way that other ways of attaching priority, like high, medium and low, do not.

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