COSMIC-based Project Management in Agile Software Develop- ment and Mapping onto related CMMI-DEV Process Areas
Enrico Berardi, Luca Santillo · 2010
Functional Size Measurement (FSM) methods have been introduced in the industry since late 70‟s and have been successfully adopted in software development pro-jects for sizing the amount of functional requirements, often for software estimation purposes. Typically, measurements with FSM are performed in two moments of the project – early design and delivery, respectively supporting project estimation and validation. This approach „works ‟ for traditional waterfall cycles, typically requires adjustments in real world requirements changes over the projects, but is simply un-effective in modern agile development methodologies, where Evolutionary Re-quirements Analysis is the rule and the user (providing requirements and feed-backs) is constantly involved in the development process. This work depicts the adoption of the new generation FSM COSMIC method in or-der to address the agile development process with a standard measurement ap-proach. Such approach results in fine-tuned measures all over the project cycle for agile projects – with a single metrics that holds valid from early design to end phases, while adequately covering all the intermediate iterations and refinements. Project management practices, such as Earned Value assessment, as well as gen-eral process improvement practices, such as the CMMI-DEV framework, are easily mapped onto COSMIC measurement and benefit from the proposed approach.