Early software cost estimates depend on some form of requirements articulation. In this talk we will see how easy it is to misunderstand requirements and end up with wildly incorrect cost estimates, especially on Agile software endeavors.

We will see some of the different ways that requirements can be misunderstood and how this can affect cost estimates.

We will see how to improve cost estimation accuracy by addressing problems with ambiguity, consistency, completeness and duplication.

We will also see how, using automated requirements analysis, requirements quality can be improved in a fraction of the time it would take to do the same manually. Finally we will see how this work can reducing the uncertainty of the early cost estimates. We will also briefly see automated functional sizing at work.