Utilizing Change Impact Analysis for Effort Estimation in Agile Development

Abstract

Constantly evolving requirements and use of expert judgment makes effort estimation challenging in the Agile development context. To improve expert judgment based estimation (EE) methods, we introduced a framework to integrate these with change impact analysis (IA) techniques. In this paper, we report the findings of an empirical investigation which we performed together at SAP SE, a German multinational software corporation. The objective of this study was to evaluate the concept of utilizing IA for EE. Furthermore, through mock-up we identified and further refined the workflow, and evaluated its usefulness from the perspective of agile development teams. The results indicate that the overall concept of utilizing change impact analysis is perceived as very useful for supporting effort estimation. The workflow instantiated via mock-up was understandable, easy to use, provides useful visualization capabilities and practitioners expressed interest to use it in their estimation process.