User story

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

An Ontology-Based Approach to the Agile Requirements Engineering

Abstract: The paper presents an approach to the agile requirements engineering based on the OWL ontologies. A brief overview of the benefits of an ontology-based approach to requirements engineering is given. Attention is focused on agile engineering requirements process. The proposed approach uses three ontologies. The first ontology is used to represent knowledge about the agile requirements engineering process. The second ontology is designed to match natural language sentences with the requirements in order to identify conflicts. The third ontology is used to accumulate the knowledge about the domain of the software product. The first ontology is core. This ontology consists of classes corresponding to events, roles and artefacts of agile development. Object properties established between the individuals of class can be used to identify directly or indirectly linked requirements and requirements artefacts. This enables maintaining requirements traceability. Also the ontology takes into account particular qualities of working with the requirements in agile development processes including knowledge about the criteria for assessing the quality of user stories that is the most common form to record the requirements in agile methods. The ontologies are implemented in the Protege environment.

USARP method: eliciting and describing USAbility Requirements with Personas and user stories

Abstract: Usability is considered one of the main attributes of software quality. Thus, it becomes necessary to deal with usability requirements at early stages of software development. The cost of solving usability problems at these stages is lower, as it requires less time and effort from the development team. However, there is still a need for solutions that can support the inclusion of usability at early stages of development. In this context, this paper presents USARP, a method to elicit and describe USAbility Requirements with Personas and user stories. The proposed method was created by adopting Design Science Research. USARP proposes the joint use of: (i) a technique for creating personas, (ii) user stories for specifying requirements and (iii) guidelines for eliciting functional usability aspects for enriching the user stories. A feasibility study with novice software engineers was performed to validate the effectiveness and the suitability of the procedures proposed in the method. The results showed that the method is effective in obtaining the usability requirements. In addition, some improvements in its use procedures were identified. A new version of the method was developed based on the results.

A Standardized Procedure to Conceptualizing and Completing User Stories

Abstract: Agile Software Development incorporates an approach called user stories to document user driven features. A user story is a form of requirements written from the perspective of the user role that the feature will be most inclined towards. Every scrum team has its own definition of completion for a user story based on knowledge of the domain and technology the solution is being developed to satisfy. Within an organizational setting, this often results in a difference in the definition of complete for a user story as team members move across different teams. This paper will outline a generic set of steps aimed at standardizing the procedure utilized in documenting a user story. We will demonstrate that this procedure assists development teams in arriving at a consensus on when a user story is deemed complete.

Eagle: a team practices audit framework for agile software development

Abstract: Agile/XP (Extreme Programming) software teams are expected to follow a number of specific practices in each iteration, such as estimating the effort (”points”) required to complete user stories, properly using branches and pull requests to coordinate merging multiple contributors’ code, having frequent ”standups” to keep all team members in sync, and conducting retrospectives to identify areas of improvement for future iterations. We combine two observations in developing a methodology and tools to help teams monitor their performance on these practices. On the one hand, many Agile practices are increasingly supported by web-based tools whose ”data exhaust” can provide insight into how closely the teams are following the practices. On the other hand, some of the practices can be expressed in terms similar to those developed for expressing service level objectives (SLO) in software as a service; as an example, a typical SLO for an interactive Web site might be ”over any 5-minute window, 99% of requests to the main page must be delivered within 200ms” and, analogously, a potential Team Practice (TP) for an Agile/XP team might be ”over any 2-week iteration, 75% of stories should be ’1-point’ stories”. Following this similarity, we adapt a system originally developed for monitoring and visualizing service level agreement (SLA) compliance to monitor selected TPs for Agile/XP software teams. Specifically, the system consumes and analyzes the data exhaust from widely-used tools such as GitHub and Pivotal Tracker and provides team(s) and coach(es) a ”dashboard” summarizing the teams’ adherence to various practices. As a qualitative initial investigation of its usefulness, we deployed it to twenty student teams in a four-sprint software engineering project course. We find an improvement of the adherence to team practice and a positive students’ self-evaluations of their team practices when using the tool, compared to previous experiences using an Agile/XP methodology. The demo video is located at https://youtu.be/A4xwJMEQh9c and a landing page with a live demo at https://isa-group.github.io/2019-05-eagle-demo/.

User Story Mapping-Based Method for Domain Semantic Modeling

Abstract: User story mapping (USM) for domain modeling is a method derived from the software functionality definition domain, which puts the end-user and his perspective in focus. The domain of interest is defined through the collection of user activities, which indirectly gathers all actors, resources, processes and overall dynamics of the domain. USM is a manual procedure that is conducted between the semantics expert and the domain expert, and can sometimes require a number of time-consuming iterations. The ADOxx metamodeling platform facilitated the development of a USM digital tool which provides enhanced performance and visual environment.