Forging high-quality User Stories: Towards a discipline for Agile Requirements

Lucassen, Garm; Dalpiaz, Fabiano; Werf, Jan Martijn E. M. van der; Brinkkemper, Sjaak

doi:10.1109/re.2015.7320415

Cited by 116 publications

(80 citation statements)

References 24 publications

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“…However, user stories often also include other types of information. Our analysis of the ends available in the data sets in our previous work [35] reveals at least three possible variants of a well-formed end:…”

Section: Endmentioning

confidence: 90%

“…Existing approaches either employ highly qualitative metrics, such as the six mnemonic heuristics of the INVEST (Independent-Negotiable-Valuable-Estimatable-Scalable-Testable) framework [52], or generic guidelines for quality in agile RE [21]. We made a step forward by presenting the Quality User Story (QUS) framework (originally proposed in [35]), a collection of 13 criteria that determine the quality of user stories in terms of syntax, pragmatics, and semantics.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Our previous paper [35] proposed the QUS framework for improving user story quality and introduced the concept of the Automated Quality User Story Artisan (AQUSA) tool. In this paper, we make three new, main contributions to the literature:…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Improving agile requirements: the Quality User Story framework and tool

et al. 2016

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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.

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Section: Endmentioning

confidence: 90%

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Improving agile requirements: the Quality User Story framework and tool

et al. 2016

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“…The premise of our research is the high adoption yet low quality of user stories in industry [32,37,38]. To improve this situation, we focus on fostering deeper understanding of user stories by creating tool-assisted techniques that support practitioners in creating and communicating about high-quality user stories [36,39]. In Sect.…”

Section: Baseline: the Grimm Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Prior to that, we introduced a conceptual model and an NLP-enabled tool for assisting users in writing high-quality user stories [36] that obtained promising results [37]. In this paper, we extend the work in [53] by making two main contributions:…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Extracting conceptual models from user stories with Visual Narrator

et al. 2017

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Extracting conceptual models from natural language requirements can help identify dependencies, redundancies, and conflicts between requirements via a holistic and easy-to-understand view that is generated from lengthy textual specifications. Unfortunately, existing approaches never gained traction in practice, because they either require substantial human involvement or they deliver too low accuracy. In this paper, we propose an automated approach called Visual Narrator based on natural language processing that extracts conceptual models from user story requirements. We choose this notation because of its popularity among (agile) practitioners and its focus on the essential components of a requirement: Who? What? Why? Coupled with a careful selection and tuning of heuristics, we show how Visual Narrator enables generating conceptual models from user stories with high accuracy. Visual Narrator is part of the holistic Grimm method for user story collaboration that ranges from elicitation to the interactive visualization and analysis of requirements.

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USQA: A User Story Quality Analyzer prototype for supporting software engineering students

Jiménez¹,

Alanis

Beltrán

et al. 2023

Comp Applic In Engineering

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The Standish Group Reports 83.9% of IT Projects fail, and one of the top factors in failed projects is the incomplete requirements or user stories. Therefore, it is essential to teach undergraduate students from computer science degree programs how to create complete user stories. Computer science programs include some subjects or topics involving requirements or user stories collection and writing, such as Requirements Engineering, Software Engineering, Project Management, or Quality Software Assurance. For that reason, we designed a web application called User Story Quality Analyzer (USQA) that uses Natural Language Processing modules to detect errors regarding aspects of usefulness, completeness, and polysemes in the user stories creation. The tool was proved from three perspectives: (1) a reliability test, where 35 user stories developed by experts were tested in the app to prove the prototype's reliability; (2) usability and utility analysis; 48 students interacted with the tool and responded a Satisfaction Usability Scale and an open‐ended question, the students reported a high usability score; (3) finally, error classification, we gathered 159 user stories processed by the system, and we classified the students' common errors considering incompleteness and polysemes. After the evaluations, we concluded that USQA could evaluate the user stories as an expert, which could help the professors/teachers/instructors in their courses by providing feedback to the students when they are writing user stories.

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Forging high-quality User Stories: Towards a discipline for Agile Requirements

Cited by 116 publications

References 24 publications

Improving agile requirements: the Quality User Story framework and tool

Improving agile requirements: the Quality User Story framework and tool

Extracting conceptual models from user stories with Visual Narrator

USQA: A User Story Quality Analyzer prototype for supporting software engineering students

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