Agile Requirements Engineering: From User Stories to Software Architectures

Abstract

Most agile practitioners employ user stories for capturing requirements, also thanks to the embedding of this notation within development and project management tools. Among user story users, circa 70% follow a simple template: As a role, I want to action, so that benefit. User stories’ popularity among practitioners and their template-based structure make them ideal candidates for the application of natural language processing techniques. In our research, we have found that circa 50% of real-world user stories contain easily preventable linguistic defects. To mitigate this problem, we have created tool-supported methods that facilitate the creation of better user stories. This tutorial combines previous work of the RE-Lab@UU into a pipeline for working with user stories: (1) The basics of creating user stories and their use in requirements engineering; (2) How to improve user story quality with the Quality User Story Framework and the AQUSA tool; (3) How to generate conceptual models from user stories using the Visual Narrator tool and analyze them for possible ambiguity and inconsistency; and (4) How to link requirements to architectures via the RE4SA model. Our approach is demonstrated with results obtained from 20+ software companies employing user stories.