User story

About: User story is a research topic. Over the lifetime, 1078 publications have been published within this topic receiving 23717 citations.

How We Successfully Adapted Agile for a Research-Heavy Engineering Software Team

Abstract: In our development team at Sandia National Laboratories we have honed our Scrum processes to where we continually deliver high-performance engineering analysis software to our customers. We deliver despite non-ideal circumstances, including development work that can be categorized as exploratory research, regular use of part-time developers, team size that varies widely among Sprints, highly specialized technical skill sets and a broad range of deliverables. We believe our methodologies can be applied to many research-oriented environments such as those found in government laboratories, academic institutions and corporate research facilities. Our goal is to increase the adoption of Lean/Agile project management in these environments by sharing our experiences with those research-oriented development teams who are considering using Lean/Agile, or have started and are encountering problems. In this paper we discuss how we create and prioritize our product backlog, write our user stories, calculate our capacity, plan our Sprints, report our results and communicate our progress to customers. By providing guidance and evidence of success in these areas we hope to overcome real and perceived obstacles that may limit the adoption of Lean/Agile techniques in research-oriented development environments.

Modeling user story completion of an agile software process

Abstract: Although some researchers have studied agile techniques of software development using simulation, simulation studies of actual agile projects are difficult to find. This report on an industrial case study seeks to address this need by presenting an experience of modeling and analyzing an agile software development process using discrete event simulation. The study, undertaken for software process improvement, produced analyses that provided project management with process capability information. First, a sensitivity analysis used a designed experiment to measure the dominant factors in user story productivity. Second, a response surface provided information on the process tolerance for defect rework. Finally, a scenario comparison supported a management decision on sprint usage.

A human-centric approach to building a smarter and better parking application

Abstract: Finding a parking space can be very stressful and time consuming. A variety of different vehicle parking applications have been developed but many fail to support diverse end-users. We captured diverse human-centric issues from user reviews and literature, and then created personas that encompass a wide representative range of parking app user groups. Using these personas, user stories were created, categorized and parking app tasks prioritized. We used these to develop a prototype new "smart parking app". A cognitive walk-through was employed using each of the personas and user stories to evaluate the app. With more human-centric factors taken into account in the design and development of the app, we found that majority of the human-centric frustrations identified were resolved, when compared with a commonly used parking app.

An Approach for Reviewing Security-Related Aspects in Agile Requirements Specifications of Web Applications

Abstract: Defects in requirements specifications can have severe consequences during the software development lifecycle. Some of them result in overall project failure due to incorrect or missing quality characteristics such as security. There are several concerns that make security difficult to deal with; for instance, (1) when stakeholders discuss general requirements in meetings, they are often unaware that they should also discuss security-related topics, and (2) they typically do not have enough expertise in security. This often leads to unspecified or ill-defined security-related aspects. These concerns become even more challenging in agile contexts, where lightweight documentation is typically involved. The goal of this paper is to design and evaluate an approach for reviewing security-related aspects in agile requirements specifications of web applications. The approach considers user stories and security specifications as input and relates those user stories to security properties via Natural Language Processing. Based on the related security properties, our approach then identifies high-level security requirements from the Open Web Application Security Project to be verified and generates a reading technique to support reviewers in detecting defects. We evaluate our approach via two controlled experiment trials. We compare the effectiveness and efficiency of novice inspectors verifying security aspects in agile requirements using our approach against using the complete list of high-level security requirements. The (statistically significant) results indicate that using our approach has a positive impact (with large effect size) on the performance of inspectors in terms of effectiveness and efficiency.

The Utilization of User Sessions in Testing

Abstract: Software testing cost is rising with the complexity of modern applications' user interfaces, frameworks, and technologies. However, testing stays an import software engineering stage that insures the quality of the developed software and eventually reduces the overall cost. This paper proposed utilizing user sessions for test case generation and execution. User sessions can be gathered from the application in production environments and represent user stories or scenarios. Rather than rerunning user sessions for test automation, as in record/replay tools, this research takes the track of abstracting requirements from those sessions to make them independent of the scripting language or the tool that created them. The suggested approach abstracts user sessions to make them more independent and reusable. This approach is expected to improve the utilization of user sessions from being copied and reused in the same original format, which makes it complex to edit and inflexible, to a format that can be used and utilized in different applications and platforms.