Reverse Engineering User Stories from Code using Large Language Models

Fuente: arXiv
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Autori principali: Ouf, Mohamed, Li, Haoyu, Zhang, Michael, Guizani, Mariam
Natura: Preprint
Pubblicazione: 2025
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author Ouf, Mohamed
Li, Haoyu
Zhang, Michael
Guizani, Mariam
author_facet Ouf, Mohamed
Li, Haoyu
Zhang, Michael
Guizani, Mariam
contents User stories are essential in agile development, yet often missing or outdated in legacy and poorly documented systems. We investigate whether large language models (LLMs) can automatically recover user stories directly from source code and how prompt design impacts output quality. Using 1,750 annotated C++ snippets of varying complexity, we evaluate five state-of-the-art LLMs across six prompting strategies. Results show that all models achieve, on average, an F1 score of 0.8 for code up to 200 NLOC. Our findings show that a single illustrative example enables the smallest model (8B) to match the performance of a much larger 70B model. In contrast, structured reasoning via Chain-of-Thought offers only marginal gains, primarily for larger models.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2509_19587
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Reverse Engineering User Stories from Code using Large Language Models
Ouf, Mohamed
Li, Haoyu
Zhang, Michael
Guizani, Mariam
Software Engineering
Artificial Intelligence
User stories are essential in agile development, yet often missing or outdated in legacy and poorly documented systems. We investigate whether large language models (LLMs) can automatically recover user stories directly from source code and how prompt design impacts output quality. Using 1,750 annotated C++ snippets of varying complexity, we evaluate five state-of-the-art LLMs across six prompting strategies. Results show that all models achieve, on average, an F1 score of 0.8 for code up to 200 NLOC. Our findings show that a single illustrative example enables the smallest model (8B) to match the performance of a much larger 70B model. In contrast, structured reasoning via Chain-of-Thought offers only marginal gains, primarily for larger models.
title Reverse Engineering User Stories from Code using Large Language Models
topic Software Engineering
Artificial Intelligence
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.19587