Studies in four different organizations developing different types of software show conclusively that sizes of sprints or iterations measured using standardized COSMIC Function Points correlate much better with effort than Story Points do. This means that standardized size measurements are a better predictor for estimating Agile activities than the commonly used Story Points.

The use of functional size as a measure to make like-for-like comparisons between different software development or maintenance contracts has been common practice in administrative software for decades. In real-time software this practice is now starting to develop. Why did it take the real-time software community so long to catch up?