Guiding the Functional Change Decisions in Agile Project: An Empirical Evaluation

Agile methods are becoming increasingly used in software industry as a response to the challenges of managing the frequent changes during the software life-cycle. However, an important number of agile projects yield unsatisfactory results and end up with failure. This is due mainly to a lack of structured change control process. A well-defined change control process gives software industry a significant competitive advantage. This paper describes an evaluation of functional changes affecting either an ongoing sprint or an implemented sprint. This evaluation can greatly assist the development teams in making appropriate decisions. We quantitatively and qualitatively evaluate 15 software development projects using agile (scrum) method. We also investigate the use of COSMIC Functional Size Measurement method for a rapid quantification and evaluation of a change request.