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Estimating Story Points from Issue Reports

Published: 09 September 2016 Publication History
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  • Abstract

    Estimating the effort of software engineering tasks is notoriously hard but essential for project planning. The agile community often adopts issue reports to describe tasks, and story points to estimate task effort. In this paper, we propose a machine learning classifier for estimating the story points required to address an issue. Through empirical evaluation on one industrial project and eight open source projects, we demonstrate that such classifier is feasible. We show that ---after an initial training on over 300 issue reports--- the classifier estimates a new issue in less than 15 seconds with a mean magnitude of relative error between 0.16 and 0.61. In addition, issue type, summary, description, and related components prove to be project dependent features pivotal for story point estimation.

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    Cited By

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    • (2024)A Systematic Literature Review on Reasons and Approaches for Accurate Effort Estimations in AgileACM Computing Surveys10.1145/366336556:11(1-37)Online publication date: 28-Jun-2024
    • (2024)Case Study of a Model that evaluates the Learner Experience with DICTsExtended Abstracts of the 2024 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems10.1145/3613905.3637138(1-9)Online publication date: 11-May-2024
    • (2024)Fine-SE: Integrating Semantic Features and Expert Features for Software Effort EstimationProceedings of the IEEE/ACM 46th International Conference on Software Engineering10.1145/3597503.3623349(1-12)Online publication date: 20-May-2024
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    Published In

    cover image ACM Other conferences
    PROMISE 2016: Proceedings of the The 12th International Conference on Predictive Models and Data Analytics in Software Engineering
    September 2016
    84 pages
    ISBN:9781450347723
    DOI:10.1145/2972958
    Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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    Association for Computing Machinery

    New York, NY, United States

    Publication History

    Published: 09 September 2016

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    Author Tags

    1. Machine learning
    2. agile
    3. issue report
    4. story points

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    • Research-article
    • Research
    • Refereed limited

    Funding Sources

    • Institute for the Promotion of Innovation through Science and Technology in Flanders
    • Sardinia Regional Government

    Conference

    PROMISE 2016

    Acceptance Rates

    PROMISE 2016 Paper Acceptance Rate 10 of 23 submissions, 43%;
    Overall Acceptance Rate 98 of 213 submissions, 46%

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    Cited By

    View all
    • (2024)A Systematic Literature Review on Reasons and Approaches for Accurate Effort Estimations in AgileACM Computing Surveys10.1145/366336556:11(1-37)Online publication date: 28-Jun-2024
    • (2024)Case Study of a Model that evaluates the Learner Experience with DICTsExtended Abstracts of the 2024 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems10.1145/3613905.3637138(1-9)Online publication date: 11-May-2024
    • (2024)Fine-SE: Integrating Semantic Features and Expert Features for Software Effort EstimationProceedings of the IEEE/ACM 46th International Conference on Software Engineering10.1145/3597503.3623349(1-12)Online publication date: 20-May-2024
    • (2024)Software Effort Estimation Using Deep Learning: A Gentle ReviewArtificial Intelligence and Sustainable Computing10.1007/978-981-97-0327-2_26(351-364)Online publication date: 24-Apr-2024
    • (2024)Analyzing the Influence of Processor Speed and Clock Speed on Remaining Useful Life Estimation of Software SystemsIntelligent Computing10.1007/978-3-031-62281-6_34(490-507)Online publication date: 14-Jun-2024
    • (2024)Predicting the Duration of User Stories in Agile Project ManagementSmart Technologies for a Sustainable Future10.1007/978-3-031-61905-2_31(316-328)Online publication date: 13-Jun-2024
    • (2023)On Effectiveness of Further Pre-training on BERT Models for Story Point EstimationProceedings of the 19th International Conference on Predictive Models and Data Analytics in Software Engineering10.1145/3617555.3617877(49-53)Online publication date: 8-Dec-2023
    • (2023)Agile Effort Estimation: Have We Solved the Problem Yet? Insights From a Replication StudyIEEE Transactions on Software Engineering10.1109/TSE.2022.322873949:4(2677-2697)Online publication date: 1-Apr-2023
    • (2023)GPT2SP: A Transformer-Based Agile Story Point Estimation ApproachIEEE Transactions on Software Engineering10.1109/TSE.2022.315825249:2(611-625)Online publication date: 1-Feb-2023
    • (2023)An Agile Project Management Supporting Approach for Estimating Story Points in User Stories2023 8th International Conference on Information Technology Research (ICITR)10.1109/ICITR61062.2023.10382930(1-6)Online publication date: 7-Dec-2023
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