ESEIW 2022
Sun 18 - Fri 23 September 2022 Helsinki, Finland
Thu 22 Sep 2022 13:50 - 14:10 at Bysa - Session 2A - Open Source Software Chair(s): Gustavo Pinto

Background: Previous work has provided some initial evidence that Story Point (SP) estimated by human-experts may not accurately reflect the effort needed to realise Agile software projects.

Aims: In this paper, we aim to shed further light on the relationship between SP and Agile software development effort to understand the extent to which human-estimated SP is a good indicator of user story development effort expressed in terms of time needed to realise it.

Method: To this end, we carry out a thorough empirical study involving a total of 37,440 unique user stories from 37 different open-source projects publicly available in the TAWOS dataset. For these user stories, we investigate the correlation between the issue development time (or its approximation when the actual time is not available) and the SP estimated by human-expert by using three widely-used correlation statistics (i.e., Pearson, Kendall and Spearman). Furthermore, we investigate SP estimations made by the human-experts in order to assess the extent to which they are consistent in their estimations throughout the project, i.e., we assess whether the development time of the issues is proportionate to the SP assigned to them.

Results: The average results across the three correlation measures reveal that the correlation between the human-expert estimated SP and the approximated development time is strong for only 7% of the projects investigated, and medium (58%) or low (35%) for the remaining ones. Similar results are obtained when the actual development time is considered. Our empirical study also reveals that the estimation made is often not consistent throughout the project and the human estimator tends to misestimate in 78% of the cases..

Conclusions: Our empirical results suggest that SP might not be an accurate indicator of open-source Agile software development effort expressed in terms of development time. The impact of its use as an indicator of effort should be explored in future work, for example as a cost-driver in automated effort estimation models or as the prediction target.

Thu 22 Sep

Displayed time zone: Athens change

13:30 - 15:00
Session 2A - Open Source SoftwareESEM Journal-First Papers / ESEM Technical Papers at Bysa
Chair(s): Gustavo Pinto Federal University of Pará (UFPA) and Zup Innovation
13:30
20m
Full-paper
How to Choose a Task? Mismatches in Perspectives of Newcomers and Existing Contributors
ESEM Technical Papers
Fabio Marcos De Abreu Santos Northern Arizona University, USA, Bianca Trinkenreich Northern of Arizona Univeristy, João Felipe Pimentel , Igor Scaliante Wiese Federal University of Technology – Paraná - UTFPR, Igor Steinmacher Northern Arizona University, USA, Anita Sarma Oregon State University, Marco Gerosa Northern Arizona University, USA
13:50
20m
Full-paper
On the Relationship Between Story Points and Development Effort in Agile Open-Source Software
ESEM Technical Papers
Vali Tawosi University College London, Rebecca Moussa University College London, Federica Sarro University College London
Pre-print
14:10
20m
Full-paper
Analyzing the Relationship between Community and Design Smells in Open-Source Software Projects: An Empirical Study
ESEM Technical Papers
Haris Mumtaz University of Auckland, Paramvir Singh The University of Auckland, Kelly Blincoe University of Auckland
14:30
15m
Full-paper
On the analysis of non-coding roles in open source development
ESEM Journal-First Papers
Javier Luis Cánovas Izquierdo IN3 - UOC, Jordi Cabot Open University of Catalonia, Spain