QVD: Improving Quality – User Story as a Quality Value Driver (QVD) in Software Development

Abstract

The term "software quality" is widely used, and although it has many definitions, no one definition is universally accepted. Often, the definition refers to specific phases of the software development process and not to software as a whole. In our article, in order to improve the quality of the software, we decided to improve the quality of the phases. To do that, we will focus attention on the drivers that advance quality value and use a new concept called QVD - quality value drivers. We focused on the requirements phase of software development, which probably ranks as the crucial first step. Hence, as a QVD we present the idea of "User Story" (US), a short and simple description of a functionality valuable to a user of a system. In the study, a comparison is made between requirements written by the US method and requirements that are not. After analyzing the results, we concluded that requirements written by the US method have been better understood and evaluated as less difficult to develop. The overall quality rating of their writing is higher than previously. In addition, learning the US method gives the person the ability to better assess the quality of requirements. Finally, improving the writing of the requirements using the US method as QVD improves the quality of the development process, eventually improving the software quality.