"Forging High Quality User Stories: Towards a Discipline for Agile Requirements" - Requirements...

Forging High-Quality User Stories

Garm Lucassen, Fabiano Dalpiaz, Jan Martijn E.M. van der Werf, Sjaak BrinkkemperAugust 27 2015

Towards a Discipline for Agile Requirements (R13)

Garm LucassenRE’15 August 27 2015

Meet Anne• Project manager web dev team

• Writes high quality user stories

• Developers do not

• Confused clients

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In this presentation

Foundations for:

• Solve Anne’s problem

• Help practitioners write higher quality user stories

• Conduct advanced analyses in future work

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What is a user story?• User stories represent customer requirements in a card,

leading to conversation and confirmation (Jeffries, 2001)

• User stories only capture the essential elements of a requirement: - who it is for - what it expects from the system - why it is important (optional)

• Simple format:

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who what why

(Mike Cohn)

(Yu and Mylopoulos, 1994)

As a role I want to action (so that benefit, , )


What is a user story?• “As a User, I want to purchase an event ticket”

• “As a User, I want to be notified when an event is close to becoming sold out, so that I do not miss the event”

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“As a User I want to search for new events by favorited organizers

so that I am the first to know of new events”

, ,


Overview

1. Quality User Story Framework

2. Conceptual Model of User Stories

3. Cross-Story Relationships

4. Automatic Quality User Story Artisan (AQUSA)

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1. What is user story quality?2. Conceptualizing a user story 3. Cross-story relationships 4. Automating the QUS Framework


Quality User Story Framework Introduction

• Defines 14 quality criteria for individual and sets of user stories

• All derivable from user story text

• Ignores requirements management concerns such as effort estimation and comments

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Quality User Story Framework Overview

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Garm LucassenRE’15 August 27 2015 10

AtomicA user story expresses a requirement for exactly one feature

Quality defect exampleAs a User, I want to click a particular location from the map and thereby perform a

search of landmarks associated with that latitude longitude combination

⬇1. As a User, I want to click a particular location from the map

2. As a User, I want to search landmarks associated with a location based on lat long

split

Example 1- syntactic


Example 2 - semantic

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Problem-orientedA user story only specifies the problem, not the solution to it

Quality defect exampleAs a care professional I want to save a reimbursement. - Add save button on top

right (never grayed out)

⬇As a care professional I want to save a reimbursement

remove solution


Example 3 - pragmatic

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UniformAll user stories follow roughly the same template

Quality defect example1. As a User, I want to create an account 2. As a User, I want to reset my password

3. As an Administrator, I receive an email notification when a new user is registered

⬇As an Administrator, I want to receive an email notification when a new user is

registered

add want to

2. Conceptualizing a user story1. What is user story quality?

3. Cross-story relationships 4. Automating the QUS Framework


Conceptual model

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Subject

User Story

EndMeans

Role 1 1..*

1 0..*

Format0..1

1..*has_parent

Action Verb Direct Object

Indirect objectAdjective

1

Epic

1..*has

QualityClarification

0..* 0..*

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1 1 10..* 0..*

Dependency

0..*


“As a User, I want to search for new events by favorited organizers,


Conceptual model

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User Story

EndMeans

Role 1 1..*

1 0..*

Format0..1

1..*has_parent

1

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User Story

EndMeans

Role 1 1..*

1 0..*

Format1

11

0..1

1..*has_parent

“As a User I want to search for new events by favorited organizers


, ,


Means concepts

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Subject

Means



1 1 10..* 0..*

“I want to search for new events by favorited organizers”I search eventsnew

Subject Action Verb Direct Object

Adjective Indirect object

favorited organizers


Ends concepts“so that I am the first to know of new events”

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End


0..* 0..*

Dependency

0..*

“so that I am the first to know of new events”new events

DependencyClarification Quality

the first


Conceptual model

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Subject

User Story

EndMeans

Role 1 1..*

1 0..*

Format0..1

1..*has_parent



1

Epic

1..*has


0..* 0..*

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1 1 10..* 0..*

Dependency

0..*

1. What is user story quality? 2. Conceptualizing a user story

4. Automating the QUS Framework3. Cross-story relationships

- Complete - Independent - Uniform - Unique


Cross-story relationships (1)Complete

When user stories imply necessity of functionality not yet captured in another user story, the set is incomplete

Example: to read, update or delete an item you must first create it

Example: US1: As a User, I want to delete an event US2: As a User, I want to update an event

US3: As a User, I want to create an event

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Requires⬇


Cross-story relationships (2)Independent

There are many ways in which user stories are dependent on another user story. Two examples are causality and superclasses:

Example: ‘content’ can refer to different types of multimedia. Audio, video, photographs, annotated text, …

Example: US1: As a User, I want to edit profile content

US2: As a User, I want to upload a profile photo US3: As a User, I want to provide profile text

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refers to⬇


Cross-story relationships (3)Uniform

A user story has a format that is consistent with the format of all other user stories

Example: all user stories (roughly) follow the template

Example: US1. As a User, I want to create an account US2. As a User, I want to reset my password US3. As an Administrator, I receive an email notification when a new user is registered

US3’. As an Administrator, I want to receive an email notification when a new user is registered

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change to⬇

As a role I want to action (so that benefit, , )


Cross-story relationships (4)Unique

No other user story is identically or semantically the same or too similar. Many different ways: exact or semantic duplicate,

different role or ends = means

Example: US1: As a User, I want to edit an event US2: As a User, I want to change an event

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4. Automating the QUS Framework

1. What is user story quality? 2. Conceptualizing a user story 3. Cross-story relationships


Automatic Quality User Story Artisan

• Automatically assess user story quality • Restrict ourselves to criteria with potential for 100% recall

• Syntactic: Well-formed Atomic Minimal

• Semantic 100% recall unachievable • Selection of pragmatic:

Explicit dependencies Uniform Unique

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(Daniel Berry et al., 2012)

User Stories

AQUSA

Linguistic Parser

Enhancer

Analyzer

Synonyms Homonyms Ontologies

Error Report

Atomic Explicit dependencies UniqueMinimal Uniform

Report generator

User story base

(Ryan, 1993)



Well-formedAtomic Minimal Uniform Unique

AQUSA

√only one feature no unnecessary text follows the template has a role and meansno duplicates

(with my name)“As a Visitor, I want to supply my personal details, so that the ticket is personalized ”

√√√⤫

“As a Visitor, I want to supply my personal details, so that the ticket is personalized (with my name)”

error!

none found

√Explicit dependencies



Well-formedAtomic Minimal Uniform Unique

AQUSA

√only one feature no unnecessary text follows the template has a role and meansno duplicates

√√√

“As a Visitor, I want to supply my personal details, so that the ticket is personalized”

none found

√Explicit dependencies

√ “As a Visitor, I want to supply my personal details, so that the ticket is personalized”

√

perfect story



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AQUSA evaluation• Measure:

Accuracy Precision Recall Most common violations

• Apply mechanics to three datasets 1. Tailor made software project from small NL comp (98 US) 2. POS prod by Belgian team outsources to Romania (124 US) 3. Advanced health care product recently adopted US (24 US)

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AQUSA evaluation

• 25% of selected stories violate one or more quality criteria

• These data sets: 100% recall and 71% precision

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Set 1 (n=96) Set 2 (n=24) Set 3 (n=124) V FP V FP V FP

Atomic 7 5 10 3 17 12Minimal 0 - 17 - 16 - Well-formed 8 - 2 - 6 - Explicit dependencies 0 - 1 - 0 - Uniform 14 4 2 - 1 - Unique 2 - 0 - 0 - Total US with errors 27 9 19 3 37 12


AQUSA evaluation

• Violation types vary: uniform, minimal, atomic

• Sneak preview: in new tests more diverse violations and larger number of edge cases

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Set 1 (n=96) Set 2 (n=24) Set 3 (n=124) V FP V FP V FP

Atomic 7 5 10 3 17 12Minimal 0 - 17 - 16 - Well-formed 8 - 2 - 6 - Explicit dependencies 0 - 1 - 0 - Uniform 14 4 2 - 1 - Unique 2 - 0 - 0 - Total US with errors 27 9 19 3 37 12


Conclusion• Presented the theoretical foundation for improving

user story quality using NLP: • QUS Framework • Conceptual model • Cross-story relationships

• Applying AQUSA shows • Relevant quality defects present in real-world

data • Feasible to automatically detect quality defects

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Future work• Realize and evaluate AQUSA (started)

Please contribute: https://github.com/gglucass/AQUSA

• Explore role of domain & foundational ontologies

• How do practitioners use user stories? (ongoing)

• Longitudinal study w/ AQUSA in multiple software companies

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Garm Lucassen: [email protected] Fabiano Dalpiaz: [email protected] Jan Martijn van der Werf: [email protected] Sjaak Brinkkemper: [email protected]

Thank you!

mailto:[email protected]





References• M. Cohn, User Stories Applied: for Agile Software Development. Red- wood City, CA,

USA: Addison Wesley Longman Publishing Co., Inc., 2004.

• O. I. Lindland, G. Sindre, and A. Sølvberg, “Understanding Quality in Conceptual Modeling,” IEEE Software, vol. 11, no. 2, pp. 42–49, 1994.

• D. Berry, R. Gacitua, P. Sawyer, and S. Tjong, “The Case for Dumb Requirements Engineering Tools,” in Proc. of Requirements Engineer- ing: Foundation for Software Quality. Springer, 2012, vol. 7195, pp. 211–217.

• IEEE Computer Society, “IEEE Recommended Practice for Software Requirements Specifications,” IEEE Std 830-1993, 1994.

• Jeffries, Ron. “Essential XP: Card, Conversation, and Confirmation.” XP Magazine (August 30, 2001)

• P. Heck and A. Zaidman, “A Quality Framework for Agile Requirements: A Practitioner’s Perspective,” CoRR, vol. abs/1406.4692, 2014. [Online]. Available: http://arxiv.org/abs/1406.4692

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http://arxiv.org/abs/1406.4692


AQUSA Architecture

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User Stories

AQUSA

Linguistic Parser

Enhancer

Analyzer

Synonyms Homonyms Ontologies

Error Report

Atomic Explicit dependencies UniqueMinimal Uniform

Report generator

User story base

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