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The Use and Effectiveness of User Stories in Practice

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Requirements Engineering: Foundation for Software Quality (REFSQ 2016)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNPSE,volume 9619))

Abstract

[Context and motivation] User stories are an increasingly popular textual notation to capture requirements in agile software development. [Question/Problem] To date there is no scientific evidence on the effectiveness of user stories. The goal of this paper is to explore how practicioners perceive this artifact in the context of requirements engineering. [Principal ideas/results] We explore perceived effectiveness of user stories by reporting on a survey with 182 responses from practitioners and 21 follow-up semi-structured interviews. The data shows that practitioners agree that using user stories, a user story template and quality guidelines such as the INVEST mnemonic improve their productivity and the quality of their work deliverables. [Contribution] By combining the survey data with 21 semi-structured follow-up interviews, we present 12 findings on the usage and perception of user stories by practitioners that employ user stories in their everyday work environment.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Note that 7 responses are excluded. These respondents gave unique ‘other’ answers, whose samples are too small for statistical analysis.

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Acknowledgements

The authors would like to thank all survey respondents for participating in our research, the three respondents to the pilot survey as well as Leo Pruijt and Erik Jagroep for reviewing drafts of this paper.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Utrecht University, Utrecht, The Netherlands

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

Authors
  1. Garm Lucassen
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  2. Fabiano Dalpiaz
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  3. Jan Martijn E. M. van der Werf
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  4. Sjaak Brinkkemper
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Fabiano Dalpiaz .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. University of Twente, Enschede, The Netherlands

    Maya Daneva

  2. Universidad Politècnica de Valencia, Valencia, Spain

    Oscar Pastor

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Lucassen, G., Dalpiaz, F., Werf, J.M.E.M.v.d., Brinkkemper, S. (2016). The Use and Effectiveness of User Stories in Practice. In: Daneva, M., Pastor, O. (eds) Requirements Engineering: Foundation for Software Quality. REFSQ 2016. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 9619. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-30282-9_14

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-30282-9_14

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  • Publisher Name: Springer, Cham

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-319-30281-2

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-319-30282-9

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