Automated authoring of Gherkin Behavior-Driven Development (BDD) acceptance criteria remains a manual bottleneck in requirements engineering. This study investigates whether epic-organized LLM-generated Gherkin produces higher quality and coverage than requirement-aligned generation. We compare our Timeless (an epic-organized LLM pipeline) approach against a naive large language model (LLM) baseline on four requirements documents (107 requirements) from the PURE dataset. Evaluation covers structural metrics, automated requirement coverage via TF-IDF and dense embeddings, and blind expert assessment by four researchers. In our evaluation, the JSON-constrained pipeline produced structurally valid scenarios across all generated outputs, while the zero-shot baseline achieved 99% structural validity. Semantic coverage was comparable to the baseline, with Timeless achieving 94.3% semantic Requirement Coverage Rate compared with 92.9% for the baseline. TF-IDF produced lower coverage scores for the epic-organized output, suggesting that lexical metrics may miss coverage when scenarios paraphrase requirements at a higher level of abstraction. Expert raters prefer the epic-organized strategy on Correctness (4.61 vs 4.14), Executability (4.61 vs 4.07), and Completeness (4.31 vs 3.50). Overall, the results suggest that epic-organized generation can improve perceived Gherkin quality while maintaining comparable semantic coverage, although broader replication is needed before generalizing this finding.
Agile - denoting "the quality of being agile, readiness for motion, nimbleness, activity, dexterity in motion" - software development methods are attempting to offer an answer to the eager business community asking for lighter weight along with faster and nimbler software development processes. This is especially the case with the rapidly growing and volatile Internet software industry as well as for the emerging mobile application environment. The new agile methods have evoked substantial amount of literature and debates. However, academic research on the subject is still scarce, as most of existing publications are written by practitioners or consultants. The aim of this publication is to begin filling this gap by systematically reviewing the existing literature on agile software development methodologies. This publication has three purposes. First, it proposes a definition and a classification of agile software development approaches. Second, it analyses ten software development methods that can be characterized as being "agile" against the defined criterion. Third, it compares these methods and highlights their similarities and differences. Based on this analysis, future research needs are identified and discussed.
P. Abrahamsson, O. Salo, Jussi Ronkainen et al.· arXiv.org· 728 citations· ⚡54
Context: Software startups are newly created companies with no operating history and fast in producing cutting-edge technologies. These companies develop software under highly uncertain conditions, tackling fast-growing markets under severe lack of resources. Therefore, software startups present a unique combination of characteristics which pose several challenges to software development activities. Objective: This study aims to structure and analyze the literature on software development in startup companies, determining thereby the potential for technology transfer and identifying software development work practices reported by practitioners and researchers. Method: We conducted a systematic mapping study, developing a classification schema, ranking the selected primary studies according their rigor and relevance, and analyzing reported software development work practices in startups. Results: A total of 43 primary studies were identified and mapped, synthesizing the available evidence on software development in startups. Only 16 studies are entirely dedicated to software development in startups, of which 10 result in a weak contribution (advice and implications (6); lesson learned (3); tool (1)). Nineteen studies focus on managerial and organizational factors. Moreover, only 9 studies exhibit high scientific rigor and relevance. From the reviewed primary studies, 213 software engineering work practices were extracted, categorized and analyzed. Conclusion: This mapping study provides the first systematic exploration of the state-of-art on software startup research. The existing body of knowledge is limited to a few high quality studies. Furthermore, the results indicate that software engineering work practices are chosen opportunistically, adapted and configured to provide value under the constrains imposed by the startup context.
Nicolò Paternoster, Carmine Giardino, M. Unterkalmsteiner et al.· Information and Software Tec...· 394 citations· ⚡54
The new ChartNet training dataset could improve the accuracy of vision-language models that help analyze business trends or interpret scientific figures.
