Agile Story-Point Estimation: Is RAG a Better Way to Go?
The sprint-based iterative approach in the Agile software development method allows continuous feedback and adaptation. One of the crucial Agile software development activities is the sprint-planning session where developers estimate the effort required to complete tasks through a consensus-based estimation technique such as Planning Poker. In the Agile software development method, a common unit of measuring development effort is Story Point (SP) which is assigned to tasks to understand the complexity and development time needed to complete them. Despite the benefits of this process, it is an extremely time-consuming manual process. To mitigate this issue, in this study, we investigated if this manual process can be automated using Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) which comprises a “Retriever” and a “Generator”. We applied two embedding models - Beijing Academy of Artificial Intelligence’s (BAAI) bge-large-en-v1.5, and Sentence-Transformers’ all-mpnet-base-v2 on 23 open-source software projects of varying sizes and examined four key aspects: 1) how retrieval hyper-parameters influence the performance, 2) whether estimation accuracy differs across different sizes of the projects, 3) whether embedding model choice affects accuracy, and 4) how the RAG-based approach compares to the existing baselines. Although the RAG-based approach outperformed the baseline models in several occasions, our results did not exhibit statistically significant differences in performance across the projects or across the embedding models. This highlights the need for further studies and refinement of the RAG, and model adaptation strategies for better accuracy in automatically estimating user stories. To comply with open science policy we have anonymously shared the replication package.
Mon 13 AprDisplayed time zone: Brasilia, Distrito Federal, Brazil change
16:00 - 18:00 | Session 7 - LLM-Based Agents for Software Engineering TasksJournal First / Replications and Negative Results (RENE) / Research Track / ICPC Program at Europa II Chair(s): Wesley K.G. Assunção North Carolina State University, Banani Roy University of Saskatchewan | ||
16:00 10mTalk | LLMs for Qualitative Data Analysis Fail on Security-specific Comments in Human Experiments Replications and Negative Results (RENE) Maria Camporese University of Trento, Fabio Massacci University of Trento; Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, Yuanjun Gong University of Trento Pre-print File Attached | ||
16:10 10mTalk | Do comments and expertise still matter? An experiment on programmers’ adoption of AI-generated JavaScript code Journal First Changwen LI , Christoph Treude Singapore Management University, Ofir Turel The University of Melbourne | ||
16:20 10mTalk | Reducing Token Usage of State-in-Context Agents using Minification Replications and Negative Results (RENE) | ||
16:30 10mTalk | Agile Story-Point Estimation: Is RAG a Better Way to Go? Replications and Negative Results (RENE) Lamyea Maha University of Saskatchewan, Tajmilur Rahman Gannon University, Chanchal K. Roy University of Saskatchewan DOI Pre-print | ||
16:40 10mTalk | Improved Bug Localization with AI Agents Leveraging Hypothesis and Dynamic Cognition Research Track Pre-print Media Attached | ||
16:50 10mTalk | Code Ranking with Human-Inspired Agent-Based Framework Research Track Liuwen Cao South China University of Technology, liang jiaxi , Jiexin Wang South China University of Technology, Yi Cai School of Software Engineering, South China University of Technology, Guangzhou, China | ||
17:00 20mLive Q&A | Joint QA and Discussion ICPC Program | ||
17:20 40mAwards | ICPC Awards and Closing Session ICPC Program | ||