User story

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

Linguistic Patterns and Linguistic Styles for Requirements Specification: Focus on Data Entities

Abstract: Requirements specification includes technical concerns of an information system and is used throughout its life cycle. It allows for sharing the vision of the system among stakeholders and facilitates its development and operation processes. Natural languages are the most common form of requirements representation, however, they also exhibit characteristics that often introduce quality problems, such as inconsistency, incompleteness, and ambiguousness. This paper adopts the notions of linguistic pattern and linguistic style and discusses their relevance to produce better technical documentation. It focuses on the textual specification of data entities, which are elements commonly referred to throughout different types of requirements, like use cases, user stories, or functional requirements. This paper discusses how to textually represent the following elements: data entity, attribute, data type, data entity constraint, attribute constraint, and even cluster of data entities. This paper shows concrete examples and supports the discussion with three linguistic styles, represented by a rigorous requirements specification language and two informal controlled natural languages, one with a more compact and another with a more verbose, expressive, and complete representation. We analyzed how other languages cope with the representation of these data entity elements and complemented that analysis and comparison based on the PENS classification scheme. We conducted a pilot evaluation session with nineteen professional subjects who participated and provided encouraging feedback, with positive scores in all the analyzed dimensions. From this feedback, we preliminarily conclude that the adoption of these linguistic patterns would help to produce better requirements specifications written more systematically and consistently.

From User Stories to Use Case Scenarios towards a Generative Approach

Abstract: User stories are increasingly adopted as the basis of requirement engineering artefacts in Agile Software Development. Surveys have shown that user stories are perceived as being effective at describing the main goals of a system. But the continuous management of a product backlog may be particularly time-consuming and error-prone, especially when assessing the quality or scope of user stories and keeping an eye on the system's big picture. On the other hand, models have been recognised as effective tools for communication and analysis purposes. In this research, we propose a generative approach to create robustness diagrams, i.e. a form of semi-formal use case scenarios, from the automated analysis of user stories. Stories are transformed into diagrams, enabling requirement engineers and users to validate the main concepts and functional steps behind stories and discover malformed or redundant stories. Such models also open the door for automated systematic analysis.

Teaching team work: an extreme week for first-year programmers

Abstract: Professional software development implies team work Therefore working in a team should be an essential part in the software engineering curriculum We use Extreme Programming (XP) as a high-discipline software development methodology to teach software engineering within a team quite early in the curriculum This seems not easy at first sight, as XP is aimed mainly at experienced programmers But XP is highly motivating for students if it can be applied within the framework of a real project After their first year of programming, students at the University of Hamburg get the chance to take part in a three week project that includes one week of intensive programming This programming week in the middle is organized following XP principles In this paper we describe the way we adopt XP for this week, argue about the circumstances for a compact XP-like software engineering week, and reflect on the experience we made

How Agile Development Can Transform Defense IT Acquisition

Abstract: Traditional defense acquisition frameworks are often too large, complex, and slow to acquire information technology (IT) capabilities effectively. Defense acquisition organizations for years have been concerned about the lengthy IT development timelines and given the pace of change in operations and technology, it is critical to look for new strategies to acquire IT for defense systems. Over the last decade, agile software development emerged as a leading model across industry with growing adoption and success. Agile is centered on small development Teams delivering small, frequent releases of capabilities, with active user involvement. From a planning and execution viewpoint, agile emphasizes an iterative approach with each iteration informing the next. The focus is less on extensive upfront planning for entire programs and more on responsiveness to internal and external changes, such as operations, technology, and budgets. Based on US and Italian experiences, this paper discusses some of the common challenges in implementing agile practices and recommended solutions to overcome these barriers.

Evaluating the usage of predefined interactive behaviors for writing user stories: an empirical study with potential product owners

Abstract: Behavior-driven development (BDD) has gained popularity in agile software development as a means of specifying user requirements through user stories and scenarios for interactive systems under construction. Templates for guiding the writing of such stories are widely employed and can be helpful to ensure that consistent information about the requirements is provided. With the aim of getting preliminary results about how product owners (POs) write their own user stories under a predefined template, we conducted a case study with potential POs at the department in charge of business trips in a French research institute. The participants were invited to write their own user stories to describe a feature they are used to perform. The resultant stories have been analyzed to check their adherence to a template including common interactive behaviors defined by an ontology for interactive systems. Although the participants have followed different specification strategies, we observed an overall high level of adherence to the proposed template (62.26%). The results also pointed out to a wide use of domain-dependent behaviors, with the interactive behaviors defined by the ontology being, to some extent, reproduced by the participants even without prior training in the adopted vocabulary.