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Scaling Agile Estimation Methods with a Parametric Cost Model

Authors:
Carl Friedrich Kreß
Oliver Hummel
Mahmudul Huq

Keywords: software cost estimation; COCOMO; agile; Scrum

Abstract:
Estimating the likely cost of a software development project is important with every process model. In agile settings, story points have proven being a useful tool to predict effort for small and medium sized projects or a few iterations. However when projects grow larger, their effort usually grows faster than a linear projection with story points would suggest. This can be attributed to so-called diseconomies of scale, e.g., caused by the growing communication overhead and need for refactoring in large projects. Although these effects are sup-ported by all long-established parametric cost models, such as COCOMO, they are not yet taken into account with agile story point estimation. In this paper, we show how to calculate the magnitude of these non-linear effects to create awareness for this problem in the agile community. As a remedy, we propose three solutions to combine story points with COCOMO II in order to create advanced estimation methods that can be applied to large agile projects.

Pages: 156 to 161

Copyright: Copyright (c) IARIA, 2014

Publication date: October 12, 2014

Published in: conference

ISSN: 2308-4235

ISBN: 978-1-61208-367-4

Location: Nice, France

Dates: from October 12, 2014 to October 16, 2014