Research Summaries

Back DoD Agile Software Development Early Phase Cost Modeling

Fiscal Year 2018
Division Research & Sponsored Programs
Department Naval Research Program
Investigator(s) Madachy, Raymond J.
Sponsor NPS Naval Research Program (Navy)
Summary This research will address needed improvements in current cost estimation metrics, models and estimation methods for agile projects to reflect emerging trends in the Navy and across DoD. It will collect and analyze empirical project data to test hypotheses about agile cost estimation metrics and cost models. New Cost Estimating Relationships (CERs) will be subjected to statistical testing for validation.
In the DoD it is necessary and most critical to estimate software development cost in early lifecycle phases when limited data is available to evaluate proposals and establish initial program budgets. The problem is compounded because agile software processes are increasingly used in the DoD, so there is a dire need for new, accurate, credible cost models calibrated to actual project data.
Acquisition practices must keep pace with the changing processes. Agile software processes (e.g. Scrum, Extreme Programming) are now prevalent in industry and are being adopted more across the Navy, other services and federal agencies. They integrate planning, design, development, and testing into an iterative lifecycle to deliver software at frequent intervals.
New and relevant cost models will be derived from recent project data in the DoD’s Cost Assessment Data Enterprise (CADE) repository plus supplemental data. Previously, early phase CERs were developed from CADE data using size in source lines of code and military application domain as predictors. However, none of the data was for agile projects which frequently use Story Points, Function Points, and Use Case Points for software size. Choosing the optimal size measure is instrumental for accurate cost models with other available metrics .
During early inception or elaboration, size metrics must be approximated before more elaborated design constructs are available later in development. Thus there is a need for a proxy size measure to estimate effort during the contract bidding phase and earlier.
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Publications Publications, theses (not shown) and data repositories will be added to the portal record when information is available in FAIRS and brought back to the portal
Data Publications, theses (not shown) and data repositories will be added to the portal record when information is available in FAIRS and brought back to the portal