Estimating user story points using document fingerprints

In Scrum process, there are several techniques for estimating user story points such as planning poker, expert judgment and analogy. The effort estimation might be performed by the inexperienced team members who are unfamiliar with the particular business domain involved. To improve the estimation performance, the historical data of the similar user story points from the previous successful projects are considered useful and guiding as the analogous estimation. In this paper, we exploit an alternative searching technique, called the document fingerprints, to retrieve the similar issues from the public repository of project management assets, called JIRA. We also use MMRE and Benchmarking class to evaluate the effectiveness and efficiency of our searching algorithm. The results show that the document fingerprints technique works reasonably well, especially for the user stories regarding the existing business domain.