Guidelines for utilizing change impact analysis when estimating effort in agile software development

In agile development context, estimating effort of constantly evolving requirements is challenging. Moreover, expert judgment which is the most used estimation method in this context is prone to bias, utilizes limited information and affects the accuracy of estimates. In order to overcome these shortcomings, consideration of information like complexity and impact of changes (requirements) on the underlying system have been proposed in our earlier study. We introduced an improvement framework that integrates change impact analysis with effort estimation methods. In this paper, we are proposing guidelines on how to integrate and operationalize the impact analysis while estimating effort through utilizing our framework in an agile development context. Operationalization of this framework will provide practitioners with additional information about the impact and support them in making informed decisions regarding effort estimation. It will increase transparency in the whole estimation process at the same time.