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 Effectiveness of Clustering for Story Point Estimation

Abstract: Automated techniques to estimate Story Points (SP) for user stories in agile software development came to the fore a decade ago. Yet, the state-of-the-art estimation techniques' accuracy has room for improvement. In this paper, we present a new approach for SP estimation, based on analysing textual features of software issues by employing latent Dirichlet allocation (LDA) and clustering. We first use LDA to represent issue reports in a new space of generated topics. We then use hierarchical clustering to agglomerate issues into clusters based on their topic similarities. Next, we build estimation models using the issues in each cluster. Then, we find the closest cluster to the new coming issue and use the model from that cluster to estimate the SP. Our approach is evaluated on a dataset of 26 open source projects with a total of 31,960 issues and compared against both baselines and state-of-the-art SP estimation techniques. The results show that the estimation performance of our proposed approach is as good as the state-of-the-art. However, none of these approaches is statistically significantly better than more naive estimators in all cases, which does not justify their additional complexity. We therefore encourage future work to develop alternative strategies for story points estimation. The experimental data and scripts we used in this work are publicly available to allow for replication and extension.

Reducing Ambiguity in Requirements Elicitation via Gamification

Abstract: The overall quality and success of software highly depends on the involvement of stakeholders. Requirements elicitation supports RE analyst to gather requirements from the stakeholders based on their needs. There are multiple elicitation techniques present in literature and used by the practitioners. Some of them are questionnaires, interviews, prototyping, and user stories etc. However, these techniques are based on textual representation of requirements. These techniques are quite common among the requirement engineers yet problems of ambiguity, inconsistency, incompleteness still exist mostly due to their textual nature and lack of stakeholder involvement. Lack of clarity about the system increases the ambiguity of what exactly are the system requirements. Since elicitation is carried at an early stage of development the users are not sure of what they want, as requirements tend to evolve with the help of discussions and interactions among various stakeholders and technical team. Furthermore, the conventional elicitation methods are limited when it comes to stakeholders’ participation and involvement, thus leaving a space for more ambiguous and incomplete requirements. In this work, Gamification, a game-based context will be used in non-gaming context for user involvement in fun ways. During elicitation, gamification would help to involve and interact with the stakeholders, with an intention to develop their interest in eliciting and finalizing system requirements. The goal of this paper is to reduce ambiguity during requirements elicitation. This would help in reducing the cost and time of development. Furthermore, we will elicit software requirements using gamification by developing a gamification tool with a focus to elicit unambiguous requirements by ensuring users’ participation and maintaining interest. The validation of tool would be done using multiple confirmatory case studies from software industry.

Enabling the Reuse of Software Development Assets Through a Taxonomy for User Stories

Abstract: Context - Agile Software Development (ASD) and Reuse-Driven Software Engineering (RDSE) are well-accepted strategies to improve the efficiency of software processes. A challenge to integrate both approaches is that ASD relies mostly on tacit knowledge, hampering the reuse of software development assets. An opportunity to enable RDSE for ASD is by improving the traceability between user stories (USs), the most used notation to register product requirements in ASD. Having enough link semantics between USs could enable defining similarity between them and, consequently, promote RDSE for ASD. However, this is an open challenge. Objective - To propose a taxonomy for adding link semantics between USs, focusing on easing the task of identifying similar ones. Such links, with support of traceability tools, enable the reuse of USs and their related assets. Method : We constructed a taxonomy for types of US focusing on Web Information Systems. The taxonomy is used to classify the US, given two facets: module and operation. Such information is used to infer the similarity between USs using link rules. We developed the taxonomy based on an empirical analysis of five product backlogs, containing a total of 118 USs. Afterward, we validated the taxonomy in terms of its potential to enable the reuse of US-related assets. First, we executed an offline validation by applying it to classify 530 USs from 26 already ended projects. Finally, we applied the taxonomy in a case study with two ongoing projects (59 USs). Results : The proposed taxonomy for USs is composed of two sub-facets, namely, module and operation, which have, respectively, three and 18 terms. In terms of coverage, for the offline study and case study, we classified 90.17% of the USs with the proposed taxonomy. For the case study, we classified all the USs analyzed. Conclusion : We concluded that it is possible to use our approach to compare USs and, consequently, retrieve their related assets. Our results regarding its practical utility have shown that users considered the taxonomy a useful approach to ease the process of assessing the similarity between user stories.

Extreme programming vs scrum: a comparison of agile models

Abstract: For past couple of years agile software methods have been quite popular among the researchers. Agile models are known as light weight in contrast with conventional software development methodologies, due to their casual, versatile and adaptable style. Agile frameworks became heartily accepted by the software society in view of their concentration towards timely software conveyance, product quality and user satisfaction. For the fulfillment of requirements and needs of different software projects multiple agile frameworks are present to choose from. Out of these models Extreme Programming and Scrum are the most recognizable and generally utilized frameworks. This research contributes by investigating these two frameworks thoroughly. This paper conducts a comprehensive comparison between Scrum and Extreme programming to track down their commonalities, dissimilarities and investigate those attributes which complement each other.

Data- and Value-Driven Software Engineering with Deep Customer Insight: Proceedings of the Seminar No. 58314308

Abstract: There is a need in many software-based companies to evolve their software development practices towards continuous integration and continuous deployment. This allows a company to frequently and rapidly integrate and deploy their work and in consequence also opens opportunities for getting feedback from customers on a regular basis. Ideally, this feedback is used to support design decisions early in the development process, e.g., to determine which features should be maintained over time and which features should be skipped. In more general terms, the entire R&D system of an organization should be in a state where it is able to respond and act quickly based in instant customer feedback and where actual deployment of software functionality is seen as a way of fast experimenting and testing what the customer needs. Experimentation refers here to fast validation of a business model or more specifically validating a value hypothesis. Reaching such a state of continuous experimentation implies a lot of challenges for organizations. Selected challenges are how to develop the “right” software while developing software “right”, how to have an appropriate tool infrastructure in place, how to measure and evaluate customer value, what are appropriate feedback systems, how to improve the velocity of software development, how to increase the business hit rate with new products and features, how to integrate such experiments into the development process, how to link knowledge about value for users or customers to higher-level goals of an organization. These challenges are quite new for many software-based organizations and not sufficiently understood from a software engineering