User story

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

Investigating the State of User Involvement in Practice

Abstract: Involving users in software development has been reported to increase the probability of product and project success, as well as user satisfaction. User involvement can occur in the tasks of several different organizational functions, including a dedicated user-centered team. This article presents the results of a case study conducted to understand the current state of user involvement practice in a company producing software solutions for consumers, enterprises, and service providers. The company has recently established a centralized user experience team to provide user-centered practices for the entire development organization. Feedback was found as the most common type of user information, while concrete user participation in the development process was lacking. However, it was perceived that an organized way of involving users in the development process is needed. We hope the detailed findings and insights of this case study will act as the basis for user involvement research in the future.

Agile planning and development methods

Abstract: Agile Development is a kind of iterated software development method. Its basic concept is people-centered. Estimate and scheme of Agile Methodologies are different from the traditional ones. Most papers at home and abroad about Agile Development mainly concentrate the contrast and fusion between Agile Development and traditional methods. However, researches about estimate of Agile Development procedure are lesser. This paper introduces basic methods of agile planning based on author's practice experience from two aspects: release plan, estimation of iteration, and then lists three popular agile methodologies: Xp, scrum and crystal. Finally it summarizes the whole paper.

Agile usability engineering

Abstract: In recent years, agile methods for software and web engineering have reached widespread acceptance in the community. In contrary to classic, heavy-weight software engineering processes like the V-model, agile methods (Ambler 2002) begin coding very early while having a shorter requirements engineering up-front as well as less documentation. Following the paradigm of Extreme Programming (Beck 1999), implementation of code takes place in small increments and iterations, and small releases are delivered to the customer after each development cycle. During a short claims analysis, called the exploration phase, the development team writes user stories trying to describe user needs and roles; the interviewed people need not necessarily be the real users of the later software product. Seen from a human-computer engineering perspective, Extreme Programming (XP) thus often fails to collect real user data and starts coding with just assumptions about user needs. The development in small increments may work properly as long as the software has no focus on the user interface (UI). Changes to software architecture most often have no impact on what the user sees and interacts with.

A ontology-based process modelling for XP

Abstract: We describe the Extreme Programming Ontology (XPO), a formal model specifying the main concepts used in the extreme programming methodology and their properties. XPO's modular structure was developed using the usual normative top down approach to software engineering process modeling. It relies on a set of core components rooted in three main concepts: organisational role, product and phase. Besides being useful for indexing relevant documents and XP artifacts such as user stories and Wiki pages, XPO is aimed at being a sound basis for nonintrusive analysis of agile processes, mining process data about programmers activity and repositories content in order to extract new concepts potentially identifying critical factors in agile software development. Extension to XPO are also discussed, including other agile methodologies and more general software engineering concepts.

Understanding the role of requirements artifacts in kanban

Abstract: User stories are a well-established way to record requirements in agile projects. They can be used as such to guide the daily work of developers or be split further into tasks, which usually represent more technical requirements. User stories and tasks guide communication and collaboration in software projects. However, there are several challenges with writing and using user stories in practice that are not well documented yet. Learning about these challenges could raise awareness for potential problems. Understanding how requirements artifacts are used for daily work could lead to better guidelines on writing stories that support daily work tasks. Moreover, user stories may not be appropriate to capture all kinds of requirements that are relevant for a project. We explore how to utilize requirements artifacts effectively, what their benefits and challenges are, and how their scope granularity affects their utility. For this, we studied a software project carried out in the Software Factory at the Department of Computer Science, University of Helsinki. We investigated the requirements artifacts and then interviewed the developers and the customer about their experiences. Story and task cards have helped the participants throughout the project. However, despite having a Kanban board and rich communication within the team, some requirements were still too implicit, which also led to misunderstandings. This and other challenges revealed by the study can guide future in-depth research.