Story points changes in agile iterative development: An empirical study and a prediction approach
Story Points (SP) are an effort unit that is used to represent the relative effort of a work item. In Agile software development, SP allows a development team to estimate their delivery capacity and facilitate the sprint planning activities. Although Agile embraces changes, SP changes after the sprint planning may negatively impact the sprint plan. To minimize the impact, there is a need to better understand the SP changes and an automated approach to predict the SP changes. Hence, to better understand the SP changes, we examine the prevalence, accuracy, and impact of information changes on SP changes. Through the analyses based on 13,902 work items spread across seven open-source projects, we find that on average, 10% of the work items have SP changes. These work items typically have SP value increased by 58%-100% relative to the initial SP value when they were assigned to a sprint. We also find that the unchanged SP reflect the development time better than the changed SP. Our qualitative analysis shows that the work items with changed SP often have the information changes relating to updating the scope of work. Our empirical results suggest that SP and the scope of work should be reviewed prior or during sprint planning to achieve a reliable sprint plan. Yet, it could be a tedious task to review all work items in the product (or sprint) backlog. Therefore, we develop a classifier to predict whether a work item will have SP changes after being assigned to a sprint. Our classifier achieves an AUC of 0.69-0.8, which is significantly better than the baselines. Our results suggest that to better manage and prepare for the unreliability in SP estimation, the team can leverage our insights and the classifier during the sprint planning. To facilitate future studies, we provide the replication package and the datasets, which are available online.
Wed 16 NovDisplayed time zone: Beijing, Chongqing, Hong Kong, Urumqi change
14:00 - 15:30 | |||
14:00 15mTalk | On the Impact of Sample Duplication in Machine Learning based Android Malware Detection Journal First Yanjie Zhao Monash University, Li Li Monash University, Haoyu Wang Huazhong University of Science and Technology, Haipeng Cai Washington State University, Tegawendé F. Bissyandé SnT, University of Luxembourg, Jacques Klein University of Luxembourg, John Grundy Monash University Link to publication DOI Pre-print Media Attached | ||
14:15 15mTalk | A Machine Learning Approach for Automated Filling of Categorical Fields in Data Entry Forms Journal First Hichem Belgacem University of Luxembourg, Xiaochen Li Dalian University of Technology, Domenico Bianculli University of Luxembourg, Lionel Briand University of Luxembourg; University of Ottawa | ||
14:30 15mTalk | Story points changes in agile iterative development: An empirical study and a prediction approach Journal First Jirat Pasuksmit University of Melbourne, Patanamon Thongtanunam University of Melbourne, Shanika Karunasekera The University of Melbourne Link to publication DOI | ||
14:45 15mTalk | Towards a consistent interpretation of AIOps models Journal First Yingzhe Lyu Software Analysis and Intelligence Lab (SAIL), Queen's University, Canada, Gopi Krishnan Rajbahadur Centre for Software Excellence, Huawei, Canada, Dayi Lin Centre for Software Excellence, Huawei, Canada, Boyuan Chen Centre for Software Excellence, Huawei Canada, Zhen Ming (Jack) Jiang York University | ||
15:00 15mTalk | Can pre-trained code embeddings improve model performance? Revisiting the use of code embeddings in software engineering tasks Journal First Zishuo Ding Concordia University, Heng Li Polytechnique Montréal, Weiyi Shang Concordia University, Tse-Hsun (Peter) Chen Concordia University |