Utilization of Three Software Size Measures for Effort Estimation in Agile World: A Case Study

Abstract

Functional size measurement (FSM) methods, by being systematic and repeatable, are beneficial in the early phases of the software life cycle for core project management activities such as effort, cost, and schedule estimation. However, in agile projects, requirements are kept minimal in the early phases and are detailed over time as the project progresses. This situation makes it challenging to identify measurement components of FSM methods from requirements in the early phases, hence complicates applying FSM in agile projects. In addition, the existing FSM methods are not fully compatible with today’s architectural styles, which are evolving into event-driven decentralized structures. In this study, we present the results of a case study to compare the effectiveness of different size measures: functional -COSMIC Function Points (CFP)-, event-based - Event Points-, and code length-based - Line of Code (LOC)-on projects that were developed with agile methods and utilized a microservice-based architecture. For this purpose, we measured the size of the project and created effort estimation models based on three methods. It is found that the event-based method estimated effort with better accuracy than the CFP and LOC-based methods.