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2016 | OriginalPaper | Chapter

The Use and Effectiveness of User Stories in Practice

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

Published in: Requirements Engineering: Foundation for Software Quality

Publisher: Springer International Publishing

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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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Footnotes
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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Metadata
Title
The Use and Effectiveness of User Stories in Practice
Authors
Garm Lucassen
Fabiano Dalpiaz
Jan Martijn E. M. van der Werf
Sjaak Brinkkemper
Copyright Year
2016
DOI
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-30282-9_14

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