User story

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

Traceability in Agile Projects

Abstract: Agile methods are becoming an increasingly mainstream approach to software development. They are characterized by short iterations with frequent deliverables, test-driven development, lightweight documentation, and frequent interactions with the customer. Perhaps unsurprisingly, traceability is often seen as unnecessary and therefore unwanted in agile projects. This is due to the perceived overhead of creating and maintaining traceability links and the assumption that agile developers have sufficient understanding of a project to implement a change without the support of previously defined traceability links. This chapter explores the challenges, benefits, techniques, and processes of tracing across a broad spectrum of agile projects.

Unified user interface development: the software engineering of universally accessible interactions

Abstract: In the information society, the notion of “computing-platform” encompasses, apart from traditional desktop computers, a wide range of devices, such as public-use terminals, phones, TVs, car consoles, and a variety of home appliances. Today, such computing platforms are mainly delivered with embedded operating systems (such as Windows CE, Embedded/ Personal Java, and Psion Symbian), while their operational capabilities and supplied services are controlled through software. The broad use of such computing platforms in everyday life puts virtually anyone in the position of using interactive software applications in order to carry out a variety of tasks in a variety of contexts of use. Therefore, traditional development processes, targeted towards the elusive “average case”, become clearly inappropriate for the purposes of addressing the new demands for user- and usage-context diversity and for ensuring accessible and high-quality interactions. This paper will introduce the concept of unified user interfaces, which constitutes our theoretical platform for universally accessible interactions, characterized by the capability to self-adapt at run-time, according to the requirements of the individual user and the particular context of use. Then, the unified user interface development process for constructing unified user interfaces will be described, elaborating on the interactive-software engineering strategy to accomplish the run-time self-adaptation behaviour.

Measuring the User Experience of a Task Oriented Software

Abstract: In this paper a study on a web based tool is described that is used to keep track of attendance and work schedules by employees and managers in large companies. Ten users particpated in a think aloud test measuring the usability of a new version of the software and the user experience was measured before and after each user test. The user experience results show that the group of questions that measure the personal growth of the user got the lowest scores for this product, but pragmatic attributes, hedonic identification and attraction got much higher scores. It is not surprising that pragmatic issues get high scores for a task oriented software like this one, but it is an interesting result that the users value highly the attraction and hedonic identification. Author Keywords User experience, usability, think-aloud, user testing.

End user programming

Abstract: End-user software development is a growing avocation in every industry and every country. By the middle of the next century, computer literacy and programming skills will be almost as common as reading and writing skills. Almost every knowledge worker in the world will be able to program if he or she sets out to do so. The implications of widespread end-user software are only just beginning to be considered. There are many exciting possibilities and some potential hazards. The time is now at hand to consider business topics such as ownership of end-user applications and liability in cases of significant errors. >

Detecting terminological ambiguity in user stories: Tool and experimentation

Abstract: Context. Defects such as ambiguity and incompleteness are pervasive in software requirements, often due to the limited time that practitioners devote to writing good requirements. Objective.We study whether a synergy between humans’ analytic capabilities and natural language processing is an effective approach for quickly identifying near-synonyms, a possible source of terminological ambiguity. Method.We propose a tool-supported approach that blends information visualization with two natural language processing techniques: conceptual model extraction and semantic similarity. We evaluate the precision and recall of our approach compared to a pen-and-paper manual inspection session through a controlled quasi-experiment that involves 57 participants organized into 28 groups, each group working on one real-world requirements data set. Results.The experimental results indicate that manual inspection delivers higher recall (statistically significant with p ≤ 0.01) and non-significantly higher precision. Based on qualitative observations, we analyze the quantitative results and suggest interpretations that explain the advantages and disadvantages of each approach. Conclusions.Our experiment confirms conventional wisdom in requirements engineering: identifying terminological ambiguities is time consuming, even when with tool support; and it is hard to determine whether a near-synonym may challenge the correct development of a software system. The results suggest that the most effective approach may be a combination of manual inspection with an improved version of our tool.