User story

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

Visualizing User Story Requirements at Multiple Granularity Levels via Semantic Relatedness

Abstract: The majority of practitioners express software requirements using natural text notations such as user stories. Despite the readability of text, it is hard for people to build an accurate mental image of the most relevant entities and relationships. Even converting requirements to conceptual models is not sufficient: as the number of requirements and concepts grows, obtaining a holistic view of the requirements becomes increasingly difficult and, eventually, practically impossible. In this paper, we introduce and experiment with a novel, automated method for visualizing requirements—by showing the concepts the text references and their relationships—at different levels of granularity. We build on two pillars: (i) clustering techniques for grouping elements into coherent sets so that a simplified overview of the concepts can be created, and (ii) state-of-the-art, corpus-based semantic relatedness algorithms between words to measure the extent to which two concepts are related. We build a proof-of-concept tool and evaluate our approach by applying it to requirements from four real-world data sets.

Improving the User Story Agile Technique Using the INVEST Criteria

Abstract: Although the Agile Software Development (ADS) approach has been around for the last 15 years, it is only recently that attention has moved towards Agile Software Management (ASM) for tackling some of the management-related weaknesses, such as estimating on the basis of User Story points. This paper presents an application of the INVEST criteria (Independent - Negotiable - Valuable - Estimable - Small -Testable) for improving the measurement technique of User Stories, introducing sizing units and a technique to negotiate requirements. It includes a discussion on an approach to balancing the six criteria used to evaluate a set of User Stories in a Sprint.

A Systematic Mapping Study on Security in Agile Requirements Engineering

Abstract: [Background] The rapidly changing business environments in which many companies operate is challenging traditional Requirements Engineering (RE) approaches. This gave rise to agile approaches for RE. Security, at the same time, is an essential non-functional requirement that still tends to be difficult to address in agile development contexts. Given the fuzzy notion of "agile" in context of RE and the difficulties of appropriately handling security requirements, the overall understanding of how to handle security requirements in agile RE is still vague. [Objective] Our goal is to characterize the publication landscape of approaches that handle security requirements in agile software projects. [Method] We conducted a systematic mapping to outline relevant work and contemporary gaps for future research. [Results] In total, we identified 21 studies that met our inclusion criteria, dated from 2005 to 2017. We found that the approaches typically involve modifying agile methods, introducing new artifacts (e.g., extending the concept of user story to abuser story), or introducing guidelines to handle security issues. We also identified limitations of using these approaches related to environment, people, effort and resources. [Conclusion] Our analysis suggests that more effort needs to be invested into empirically evaluating the existing approaches and that there is an avenue for future research in the direction of mitigating the identified limitations.

There's never enough time: Doing requirements under resource constraints, and what requirements engineering can learn from agile development

Abstract: While Requirements Engineering textbooks state that a requirements specification must be complete, in real-life projects we are always starting too late, with too few resources, so we can't do everything. The software development community has solved a similar problem (not having enough resources to implement everything that was asked for) by introducing agile development methods, which offer ways of segmenting the overall project, and choosing which parts to allocate resources to. This paper is about how insights from that agile development community can be applied to requirements engineering activities for any (agile or non-agile) development project. Key terms in agile development, such as “working product” and “user story”, must be mapped intelligently to terms in requirements engineering — and not simply copied: the “product” of requirements engineering is not the same as the “product” being implemented by developers.

Understanding User Stories : Computational Linguistics in Agile Requirements Engineering

Abstract: Contemporary movies like The Social Network would lead you to believe that multi-billion software companies such as Facebook are built on individual genius. In reality, complex software is created by teams of software professionals that each have their own personality profile and expertise: from highly technical software engineers to business-minded salespeople and artistic user experience experts. The challenge? The entire team needs to talk about and agree on what piece of the software puzzle to create next. To facilitate and capture discussion on new software to be built, 50% of software companies have adopted a lightweight requirements approach called user stories. Despite this recent and substantial transition by industry, academic studies on user stories were few and far between at the start of Garm Lucassen’s PhD research. With this in mind, his research investigates the topic of user stories from the inside out. In the first three chapters, Garm Lucassen seeks to answer why user stories are popular and how to help practitioners in creating high-quality user stories. Prompted by the discovery that 56% of user stories made by practitioners include preventable errors and that guidelines for user stories quality significantly increase practitioner’s productivity and work deliverable quality, Garm proposes the Quality User Story framework and accompanying natural language processing tool Automatic Quality User Story Artisan (https://aqusa.nl/). By taking advantage of the concise and well-structured nature of high-quality user stories, AQUSA detects a subset of QUS’ quality defects with 92% recall and 77% precision. Thanks to this state-of-the-art accuracy, This accuracy has prompted software companies and universities in the Netherlands, Switzerland, Portugal and the United States to adopt this new approach to user story quality in their day-to-day work and teaching. The next three chapters focus on how to help practitioners in fully achieving the title of the dissertation: “Understanding User Stories’”. The research shows that it is possible to take advantage of computational linguistics techniques to extract and visualize the most important concepts from a collection of user stories with up to 96% recall and precision. Initial application by practitioners has shown that the freely accessible Interactive Narrator tool (https://interactivenarrator.science.uu.nl/) supports quickly analyzing and discussing new software to be built.