Predicting Development Effort from User Stories

In this paper, we propose a method for predicting development effort based on user stories. Such approach is well suited for Agile software projects where requirements are developed along with the project and only sketched in a rough manner. We apply the proposed method to two industrial Agile software projects of very different size and structure. We show that such effort estimation works reasonably well if user stories are written in a structured way.

[1]  Magne Jørgensen,et al.  Estimating Software Development Effort Based on Use Cases-Experiences from Industry , 2001, UML.

[2]  M. F. Porter,et al.  An algorithm for suffix stripping , 1997 .

[3]  Ray Welland,et al.  Agile Web Engineering (AWE) Process: Multidisciplinary Stakeholders and Team Communication , 2003, ICWE.

[4]  Isabella Wieczorek,et al.  Resource Estimation in Software Engineering , 2002 .

[5]  Alberto Sillitti,et al.  Requirements Engineering for Agile Methods , 2005 .

[6]  G. G. Stokes.  "J." , 1890, The New Yale Book of Quotations.

[7]  Witold Pedrycz,et al.  A Case Study on the Impact of Refactoring on Quality and Productivity in an Agile Team , 2008, CEE-SET.

[8]  Alberto Sillitti,et al.  Automated Identification of Tasks in Development Sessions , 2008, 2008 16th IEEE International Conference on Program Comprehension.

[9]  Nils Christian Haugen.  An empirical study of using planning poker for user story estimation , 2006, AGILE 2006 (AGILE'06).

[10]  Barbara A. Kitchenham,et al.  A Simulation Study of the Model Evaluation Criterion MMRE , 2003, IEEE Trans. Software Eng..

[11]  Barry W. Boehm,et al.  Software development cost estimation approaches — A survey , 2000, Ann. Softw. Eng..

[12]  F. J. Heemstra,et al.  Software cost estimation , 1992, Inf. Softw. Technol..

[13]  Giancarlo Succi,et al.  Effort Prediction in Iterative Software Development Processes -- Incremental Versus Global Prediction Models , 2007, ESEM 2007.

[14]  Giancarlo Succi,et al.  An empirical study of open-source and closed-source software products , 2004, IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering.

[15]  Doo-Hwan Bae,et al.  An Approach to Outlier Detection of Software Measurement Data using the K-means Clustering Method , 2007, ESEM 2007.

[16]  Alberto Sillitti,et al.  Investigating the Usefulness of Pair-Programming in a Mature Agile Team , 2008, XP.

[17]  Mohammad Alshayeb,et al.  An Empirical Validation of Object-Oriented Metrics in Two Different Iterative Software Processes , 2003, IEEE Trans. Software Eng..

[18]  R. Conradi,et al.  Effort estimation of use cases for incremental large-scale software development , 2005, Proceedings. 27th International Conference on Software Engineering, 2005. ICSE 2005..

[19]  Chris F. Kemerer,et al.  A Metrics Suite for Object Oriented Design , 2015, IEEE Trans. Software Eng..

[20]  Mitsuru Ishizuka,et al.  Keyword extraction from a single document using word co-occurrence statistical information , 2004, Int. J. Artif. Intell. Tools.

[21]  Witold Pedrycz,et al.  Incremental Effort Prediction Models in Agile Development using Radial Basis Functions , 2007, SEKE.