Ambiguity in user stories: A systematic literature review

Amna, Anis Rahmawati; Poels, Geert

doi:10.1016/j.infsof.2022.106824

Cited by 21 publications

(20 citation statements)

References 62 publications

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“…In the second phase of the selection process, we retained only the papers that addressed ambiguity problems with user stories (i.e., 36 out of 165 papers). To make this paper self-contained, we repeat the description of the search strategy and selection process as they were published in [34]. However, we emphasize that the paper counts mentioned are different as we repeated the search and selection at the end of December 2021, focusing on recently published papers.…”

Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…This way, we could extend our set of relevant papers with 21 new papers, for a total of 186 papers to be analysed. The classification schema used for this analysis is new, hence not taken from [34].…”

Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…This paper extends our previous study by updating the systematic search for published peer-reviewed research on user stories (resulting in an extended set of 186 unique studies) and investigating what research on user stories has been performed, what type of problems have been addressed, what sort of outcomes these studies have produced, how mature the research on user stories is, and what research gaps and further research opportunities exist regarding user stories and their use during RE activities of ASD projects. We believe this systematic literature mapping can be a useful reference for future research on any topic related to the use of user stories in ASD or topics related to RE in Agile methodologies or ASD projects (and not just requirements ambiguity as in our previous study [34]) allowing researchers to clearly position their contributions.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 91%

“…In the RE domain, systematic literature reviews and mapping studies were mainly conducted to identify frequently used techniques, current limitations of the techniques, and characteristics of RE artifacts [6], [41]- [49]. More specifically related to user stories, apart from our own review of the research on ambiguity in user stories [34], the systematic search of the literature that we conducted for this paper (see section 3) returned three reviews of user story research. Khan et al [50] reviewed 24 papers on project effort estimation techniques that are based on user stories.…”

Section: B Previous Literature Studiesmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…In [34], we performed a systematic literature review of 36 studies on ambiguity in user stories. The aim of the review was to analyse and synthesise what is known about ambiguity in user stories in terms of how this problem manifests itself, and what causes and effects have been described in the literature.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Systematic Literature Mapping of User Story Research

Amna

Poels

2022

IEEE Access

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User stories are a widely used artifact in Agile software development. Currently, only a limited number of secondary studies have reviewed the research on the user story technique. These research reviews focused on specific research topics related to ambiguity of requirements, effort estimation, and the application of Natural Language Processing. To our knowledge, a systematic mapping of all user story research has not been performed. To this end, we study the academic literature to investigate what user stories research has been performed, what types of problems have been identified, what sort of solutions or other types of research outcomes have been achieved, how mature the research is, and what research gaps exist. We followed Systematic Mapping Study guidelines to synthesize the currently available academic research on user stories. In total, we found 186 unique peer-reviewed studies, published in the period 2001-2021. We observed that research on the user story technique and its use had grown exponentially over the last seven years. Further, using a five-dimensional classification framework -requirements engineering activity, problem class, outcome class, type of research, type of publication -we observed several patterns in the classification of these studies across the different framework dimensions, which provided insights into the state-of-the-art and maturity of the research. We also identified four research gaps: the paucity of focused literature reviews; a lack of research on the role that user stories play in human cognition and interaction; a lack of comprehensive and mature solutions for resolving ambiguity issues with user stories early in the project; and a lack of validation and evaluation of proposed solutions. Several research opportunities are suggested, making our paper a useful reference for future research on user stories allowing researchers to clearly position their contributions.INDEX TERMS Requirements engineering, agile software development, user stories, systematic literature mapping.

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Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 91%