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 - 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.