Measureability of functional size in Agile software projects: Multiple case studies with COSMIC FSM

Abstract

Functional size measurement (FSM) has been used in software engineering for decades as a main driver for estimation and significant input for other various project management activities throughout the project life span. To apply FSM accurately at the early stages of software development process, especially for estimation purposes, functional user requirements need to be available in detail as required by the adopted FSM method. However, in agile software development, requirement specifications, in general, are kept minimal. For this reason, the adjustment of the requirements to the necessary granularity level has been articulated as one of the barriers preventing the diffusion of FSM practices among agile teams. In this paper, we take a closer look at this problem in order to investigate the usability of FSM and to reveal FSM related challenges empirically through case studies on real agile projects from different software organizations. This study also provides a snapshot of agile organizations in terms of requirement specification and estimation related practices