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Functional Size Measurement in Agile

Authors:
Thomas Fehlmann
Eberhard Kranich

Keywords: Agile Software Development; Software Metrics; Software Sizing; Sprint Performance; Product Cost Management; Thought Experiment; Gedankenexperiment

Abstract:
In Agile Software Development, story points indicate the effort needed to implement a user story up to the Definition of Done. Hence, story points can be applied to track the progress of a software product under development. A major drawback of their use is that they do not allow predicting the number of sprints needed to create or modify a software product, not even for a minimum viable product. A more promising way to measure sprints is to use functional size counts determined by IFPUG or COSMIC. Both methods yield useful results when correctly interpreted. However, the functional size of the prod-uct is not simply determined by the total functionality implemented in sprints. Agile teams often touch the same functionality more than once; adding new requirements to existing functionality must be handled adequately, and some already implemented functionality is disregarded. Moreover, refactoring, removing technical debt and software testing adds effort, measured in story points, but adds no functionality.

Pages: 7 to 15

Copyright: Copyright (c) IARIA, 2021

Publication date: October 3, 2021

Published in: conference

ISSN: 2308-4235

ISBN: 978-1-61208-894-5

Location: Barcelona, Spain

Dates: from October 3, 2021 to October 7, 2021