A Tiered Maturity Model for Cost-Benefit Analysis of Agentic vs. Traditional Software Delivery
Traditional estimation methods (story points, COCOMO II, function points) were calibrated for human teams under Scrum. They do not naturally accommodate a delivery model in which an agent does most of the authoring labor and humans shift toward specification, review, and acceptance. Organizations adopting agentic coding need a measurement framework at least as rigorous as the one they inherited from agile, but with the new cost structure built in.
- Three-tier framework spanning retrospective, project-inception, and consultative analysis
- Single estimation discipline that serves sales, delivery planning, and finance
- Worked examples with realized cost deltas of $233K (Tier 1) and $312K (Tier 2)
- Monte Carlo machinery for sizing engagements before scope is fixed (Tier 3)