Using the COSMIC method to estimate Agile user stories

Abstract

Agile Project Management (APM) is widely used in different software projects from different application domains. APM includes a series of commonly used project management approaches with the intent to handle better uncertainty and unpredictability, which is not always successful. For instance, in a large portion of software projects, accurate planning (and estimating) of whole project lifetime with Agile is difficult. Since a continuously change in (product) requirements occurs as well their incompleteness at the project initialization phase, project plan must be under control and continuously be revised according to its needs and resources. In Agile projects, planning is mainly based on guess estimate of the effort trying to balance the product and the resources not showing the part of each one. In order to improve the guess estimate, this paper proposes an approach moving from the COCOMO (Constructive Cost Model) worked, using the COSMIC measurement method at the micro-level (User Stories) jointly with the quality of the documentation for deploying the functional analysis. The proposed procedure shows that this approach can help the planner to know better why the global effort changes by the time.