Posted by What is the U.S. DoD Cost Estimation Community Saying About Agile?
From the Journal of Cost Analysis and Parametrics: Volume 12 | Issue 1 | January 2025
Downloadable File: JCAPv12i1-WhatisUSDODCostCommunitySayingAgile-Hira
Abstract: The commercial industry experienced significant improvements in productivity, cost savings, and customer satisfaction by adopting Agile development. Some commercial organizations moved away from needing cost estimates for Agile projects, since they continue developing and improving their products until budget or schedule constraints are reached. However, the estimation and budget processes are imperative for the U.S. Government, particularly systems acquired through the Department of Defense (DoD) even if the contractors building the systems adopt Agile development. Agile adoption has posed big questions for the DoD cost estimation community: Are new cost estimation methods needed? How can we move away from existing source lines of code (SLOC) based models? Can DoD systems realize the benefits reported in the commercial industry? This literature review looks to answer these questions by reviewing papers and presentations from venues that primarily target the U.S. Government and DoD cost estimators. A total of 63 papers and presentations were found relevant to this study. The major categories addressed in this paper include: the benefits and challenges in adopting the methodologies within the U.S. Government acquisition process; empirical studies that compare performances between Agile and Waterfall projects; and cost estimation challenges and methods. The DoD is still fairly inexperienced at adopting the Agile development compared to the commercial sector, but development teams have made efforts to adopt Agile within the U.S. Government’s existing Waterfall processes. This nested use creates challenges in identifying and predicting performance improvements. While there have been constant discussions on how to estimate Agile systems since 2010, very few estimation models have been published.
Authors: Anandi Hira leads research to advance the state of the art in software cost estimation and supports programs with the resulting estimation and measurement processes in her current role at Carnegie Mellon University’s (CMU’s) Software Engineering Institute (SEI). Her most recent research objective is to develop a new, innovative, capability-based software cost estimation model. Anandi received her PhD in software cost estimation under Dr. Barry Boehm at the University of Southern California (USC), where she collected software development data and calibrated the COCOMO® II software cost estimation model for functional size metrics.
Benjamin Kwok is a chief scientist at Tecolote Research and has supported cost research efforts at Space Systems Command (SSC) for over 20 years. He is mostly known for being “the USCM guy” and is a regular speaker at the SSC CIPTs. He graduated from UCSD with a BS in electrical engineering and worked at Boeing for a few years prior to Tecolote. Lastly, he is passionate about data visualization and product design.