User story

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

Systematic Literature Mapping of User Story Research

Abstract: User stories are a widely used artifact in Agile software development. Currently, only a limited number of secondary studies have reviewed the research on the user story technique. These research reviews focused on specific research topics related to ambiguity of requirements, effort estimation, and the application of Natural Language Processing. To our knowledge, a systematic mapping of all user story research has not been performed. To this end, we study the academic literature to investigate what user stories research has been performed, what types of problems have been identified, what sort of solutions or other types of research outcomes have been achieved, how mature the research is, and what research gaps exist. We followed Systematic Mapping Study guidelines to synthesize the currently available academic research on user stories. In total, we found 186 unique peer-reviewed studies, published in the period 2001-2021. We observed that research on the user story technique and its use had grown exponentially over the last seven years. Further, using a five-dimensional classification framework– requirements engineering activity, problem class, outcome class, type of research, type of publication– we observed several patterns in the classification of these studies across the different framework dimensions, which provided insights into the state-of-the-art and maturity of the research. We also identified four research gaps: the paucity of focused literature reviews; a lack of research on the role that user stories play in human cognition and interaction; a lack of comprehensive and mature solutions for resolving ambiguity issues with user stories early in the project; and a lack of validation and evaluation of proposed solutions. Several research opportunities are suggested, making our paper a useful reference for future research on user stories allowing researchers to clearly position their contributions.

Proposta e Avaliação de uma Abordagem Lúdica para o Ensino de Histórias de Usuário e Scrum

Abstract: The learning process is continuously evolving its teaching methods in order to obtain improvements in education. Teaching concepts related to requirements elicitation, scope definition and project management demands alignment between theory and practice. This work presents and assesses a new approach to teaching User Stories concepts following the agile Scrum development method. Based on the ADDIE methodology, the activity was developed and then executed with graduate and undergraduate students at Universidade X. Results demonstrated that the activity proposed achieved its goals even among students that already knew the technique or had professional experience with agile methodologies. An important contribution of this work is to make all materials and scripts available to other teachers so that the activity can be easily replicated in other universities and consequently continuously evolved.

Topic Modeling on User Stories using Word Mover's Distance

Abstract: Requirements elicitation has recently been complemented with crowd-based techniques, which continuously involve large, heterogeneous groups of users who express their feedback through a variety of media. Crowd-based elicitation has great potential for engaging with (potential) users early on but also results in large sets of raw and unstructured feedback. Consolidating and analyzing this feedback is a key challenge for turning it into sensible user requirements. In this paper, we focus on topic modeling as a means to identify topics within a large set of crowd-generated user stories and compare three approaches: (1) a traditional approach based on Latent Dirichlet Allocation, (2) a combination of word embeddings and principal component analysis, and (3) a combination of word embeddings and Word Mover's Distance. We evaluate the approaches on a publicly available set of 2,966 user stories written and categorized by crowd workers. We found that a combination of word embeddings and Word Mover's Distance is most promising. Depending on the word embeddings we use in our approaches, we manage to cluster the user stories in two ways: one that is closer to the original categorization and another that allows new insights into the dataset, e.g. to find potentially new categories. Unfortunately, no measure exists to rate the quality of our results objectively. Still, our findings provide a basis for future work towards analyzing crowd-sourced user stories.

Expectations on the Product Owner Role in Systems Engineering - A Scrum Team's Point of View

Abstract: Product Owners (PO) in the Scrum framework have an important role in the development process. While the POs primal description is straightforward - the actual implementation of this role in industries is not. Many companies face the difficulty of assigning the right level of tasks and responsibilities to this role. To provide solutions to this problem, the Product Owner role became a subject of research. However, most of the studies focus on the actual state of the role to propose solutions on how to tailor it. What is missing is the Scrum Teams perspective. Therefore, we were interested in the Teams expectations on the Product Owner role. Which tasks do they expect to be performed by this role and how would they characterize a perfect Product Owner? In an attempt to answer this question, we conducted an online survey in the oil and gas industry and gathered feedback from all members of the Scrum Team. Our findings indicate that the Scrum Team expects the Product Owner to write user stories and prioritize the backlog solely. Other tasks are expected to be done either in direct collaboration with the management or the scrum master or are not expected to be done by the Product Owner role at all. Also, the respondents would characterize a perfect Product Owner primarily as trustworthy.

Ensuring the Consistency Between User Requirements and GUI Prototypes: A Behavior-Based Automated Approach

Abstract: In a user-centered design process, graphical user interface (GUI) prototypes may be seen as an important early artifact to design and validate user requirements before making strong commitments with a full-fledged version of the user interface. Ensuring the consistency of GUI prototypes with other representations of the user requirements is then a critical aspect of the design process. This paper presents an approach which extends Behavior-Driven Development (BDD) by employing an ontology in order to provide automated assessment for GUI prototypes as design artifacts. The approach has been evaluated by exploiting user requirements described by a group of experts in the flight tickets e-commerce domain. Such requirements gave rise to a set of User Stories that have been used to automatically check the consistency of Balsamiq prototypes which were reengineered from an existing web system for booking business trips. The results have shown our approach was able to identify different types of inconsistencies in the set of analyzed artifacts, allowing to build an effective correspondence between user requirements and their representation in GUI prototypes.