User story

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

From Service-Orientation to Agile Development by Conceptually Linking Business IT Services and User Stories: A Meta-Model and a Process Fragment

Abstract: IT services are being built by IT departments and other service providers to address the core technological requirements of organizations. Even if these services solve operational issues, their adoption – because of their internal behavior – has a sustaining or non-sustaining impact on the (long term) strategy of the organization. This impact is called the Business and IT alignment (BITA); as such, it is problematic to estimate before the development of the service without a view on its design. To be properly done, BITA evaluation indeed needs details about the service run-time behavior. Conversely, the agile wave refrains from a detailed upfront software design; functions providing high operational value to users are indeed selected and built for one sprint at a time. The mismatch between a traditional service approach and an agile way of development is therefore quite obvious. The present paper proposes a method (called Agile-MoDrIGo) to reconcile these two approaches. For this purpose, it (i) decomposes services into epic user stories under the scope of which (user-level built) user stories can be mapped (i.e. functional alignment) and (ii) links services as (coarse-grained) conceptual elements along with the strategic objectives they sustain to fine-grained user story functional elements for value-driven prioritization (i.e. strategic alignment). The proposal is presented in the form of a meta-model and supported by a process fragment; it is validated on a case study in healthcare.

How to manage large APL projects: a user interface management system approach

Abstract: There is a common trend towards Graphical User Interfaces (GUI). Writing applications for such an environment puts new demands on designing software and managing its development. The applications software needs to be event based. It needs to have a special uniform "feel" and provide flexibility for both the novice and experienced user.Many of the new GUI oriented needs can be handled by traditional User Interface Toolkits or Libraries. However, using these will not solve the complexity of a good user interface design. Another approach is to choose or design a User Interface Management System (UIMS). UIMS is responsible for all user interface action and only when necessary will call actual application code for performing e.g. a calculation or data base operation.The paper describes the architecture of a large real-life UIMS based APL application project. Since a UIMS approach differs from traditional hierarchical programming, many of these differences are described in detail. Particular emphasis has been put on how this approach has affected project management and the various tasks of a software project. The paper ends by presenting some thoughts about future APL Application Development Systems.

Considering possible outcomes and the user's environment in designing user interfaces for data-intensive systems

Abstract: Application programmers are often unrealistic about the end-user's working environment and seldom cater for the effects of events which will interfere with the use of the application. Such events can disrupt the straightforward execution of a task and interfere with a user's concentration. These events, which are referred to in the paper as "quirks", could be system breakdowns, various types of interruptions to application use, or human errors. Applications often make no concession to the inevitability of quirks and seldom give assistance in rebuilding mental context afterwards or facilitate understanding of the cause in the case of an error. In addition to the normal quirks caused merely by sharing office space or in working as part of a group of people, most data-intensive systems are distributed and this tends to precipitate a whole range of errors, hitherto unsuspected, which will probably be reported to the user in all their technical verbosity, reducing the user's understanding of and confidence in, the system and perhaps necessitating intervention by specialists. The inherent distributed nature of data-intensive systems also increases the likelihood of breakdowns, since so many more computers are involved in the application than the computer being used by the end user. Few applications consider the effects of quirks while developing their systems, and the user is therefore unsupported in recovering from them. The paper discusses how applications may be designed to better support users in dealing with the effects of quirks in data-intensive systems.

User Value Based Product Adaptation: A Case of Mobile Products for Chinese Urban Elderly People

Abstract: Mobile user experience in Asia is far from optimal User interfaces and interactions are just copies of those for Western users Product designers are not clear about the needs of many user segments in Asia Products lack creative solutions specific for the Asian market, driving researchers to study users in Asia and create new concepts to improve the mobile user experience Based upon the Industrial Design Value Innovation Theory developed in the Industrial Design Department of Tsinghua University, this project sponsored by the Nokia Research Center targets the market segment of urban elderly people in China, conducts the user research and concept design for proper mobile products or service systems, and hopes to contribute to the corporate future design strategies and market development plans