A Study of User Story in Practice

Abstract

The focus of agile methodology is on customer satisfaction through the early and continuous delivery of valuable software. In agile, requirements are represented in the form of user stories. And the user stories are represented from the user's point of view. The user stories are effective only when the software practitioners are aware of the user story quality and customer value delivery. In this research work, we studied how well are the user stories used in practice. And are agile software practitioners using user stories and using them correctly? Furthermore, are they aware of the quality issues in the user stories? It was observed from our study that all agile practitioners do not use user stories. The results show that only 45% of agile practitioners used user stories. And only 14.81% of these practitioners had a sound understanding of user stories. This suggests that most of the agile software practitioners may not be using user stories correctly. Additionally, the results also show that backend developers do not seem to focus much on user stories when compared to frontend and most importantly the full-stack developers. Nonetheless, there is still a significant knowledge gap. Therefore, we see it as a general need to train and educate agile professionals about user stories so that they can be used in an effective way to generate customer value.