Story points changes in agile iterative development: An empirical study and a prediction approach

Abstract

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 19,349 work items spread across seven open-source projects, ..