Analysis of the Importance of User Stories in Agile Development

Abstract

Meeting user needs and improving user experience is an important goal of agile development. User story is an important tool to manage user needs in agile development. User story can clearly convey the users role, needs, values and other information. In response to the problem that the ordering of user stories by UX designers or agile developers is highly subjective, this paper proposes a method for objectively analysing the complex relationships between user stories. Firstly, an application of quality function deployment and dependency structure matrix is proposed to derive the dependency relationships between user stories. Secondly, a user story network is established by taking user stories as nodes and dependencies between user stories as edges. Further, The K-shell method was applied to rank user stories in terms of the strength of constraints, the strength of the constrained, outbound degree and inbound degree between nodes. Finally, a brief case study of an agile game APP is carried out to visually analyze the complex dependencies among user stories, and rank the importance of user stories from the perspective of network, which greatly reduces the response time to user needs.