This paper proposes the term method engineering for the research field of the construction of information systems development methods and tools. Some research issues in method engineering are identified. One major research topic in method engineering is discussed in depth: situational methods, i.e. the configuration of a project approach that is tuned to the project at hand. A language and support tool for the engineering of situational methods are discussed.
User stories are a widely adopted requirements notation in agile development. Yet, user stories are too often poorly written in practice and exhibit inherent quality defects. Triggered by this observation, we propose the Quality User Story (QUS) framework, a set of 13 quality criteria that user story writers should strive to conform to. Based on QUS, we present the Automatic Quality User Story Artisan (AQUSA) software tool. Relying on natural language processing (NLP) techniques, AQUSA detects quality defects and suggest possible remedies. We describe the architecture of AQUSA, its implementation, and we report on an evaluation that analyzes 1023 user stories obtained from 18 software companies. Our tool does not yet reach the ambitious 100 % recall that Daniel Berry and colleagues require NLP tools for RE to achieve. However, we obtain promising results and we identify some improvements that will substantially improve recall and precision.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.