Need to improve your estimates? Want a sound basis for planning? Crave a reliable, repeatable way to reckon the size of requirements, your product backlog and individual user stories or use cases?

Register now for SMS’ on-line training in the COSMIC Functional Size Measurement method. Five sessions of web-based training facilitated live by an experienced practitioner.

Develop your professional skills and capability to estimate, plan and manage your work-in-progress by learning the internationally acclaimed COSMIC Functional Size Measurement (FSM) method. Whether you employ traditional or agile approaches (including Scrum and Kanban), the COSMIC FSM method equips you with an objective scale to measure your outputs. When integrated with problem analysis and solution design activities, measurement costs are minimal and far outweighed by the savings obtained through improved estimation, prioritisation, and effectiveness.

The award-winning COSMIC FSM method was created in 1997 in response to business needs for improved ways to quantify software required and delivered. The resulting size measures are used to predict development effort, duration and costs. COSMIC is used to calculate productivity, velocity, and defect density. COSMIC is used to size product backlogs and sprint backlogs, and to track project progress. It is used to quantify and manage entire system portfolios. COSMIC is used in outcome-based agreements where outsourced services are paid for on a ‘price per function point’ basis. COSMIC is a recognised international standard, ISO/IEC 19761:2003. It is a National Standard in Spain & Japan. The COSMIC Method Manual has been translated into 9 languages: Arabic, Chinese, Dutch, English, French, German, Italian, Japanese, & Spanish. The COSMIC FSM method won a Technology Award from the British Computer Society in 2006 and is employed by the International Software Benchmarking Standards Group (ISBSG).

Now you can add the COSMIC FSM method to your professional skills. Training consists of a series of five 2.5 hour webinar sessions, concluding with an on-line examination so you can test what you have learned.

Topics include: how to analyse the functional size of user requirements and software projects; how function points can be estimated early in the lifecycle; how functional size can be measured at subsequent stages of production, including at the point of delivery; how function points can be counted based on the various work products generated by a project e.g. functional requirements, use cases, user stories, data models, test cases, user guides, etc; how function points can be used with other key measurements to form the basis for measuring and estimating: productivity, velocity, product quality, process variation, etc.; how function points can contribute to: understanding requirements, planning projects, monitoring progress, delivering value, controlling work-in-process, managing portfolios & programmes, and improving process performance.

Technical support can be provided after the training to enable you to resolve any issues arising when you apply your new-won skills in your own product development environment.”